'Every drop counts': Iran blood crisis deepens as Tehran donors rush to hospitals amid US‑Israel strikes
As US‑Israel strikes hit Iran, blood donation centres see long queues, with citizens rushing to help hospitals cope with rising war casualties and a shortage
Since the US and Israeli strikes on Iranian cities began in late February, blood donation centres across Tehran have become a front line of a different kind.
The queues stretch out of the doors and along the pavements, hours long, filled with students, elderly men, doctors still in their scrubs, everyone who can give, give.
"I saw in real anxiety people's faces," Saeida Najafi, a donor who went to a centre in north Tehran in the early days of the attacks, told The New Arab. "Not fear of the needle. Fear that patients in hospitals wouldn't find enough blood units."
She had come in response to a public call on Iranian media urging citizens to respond to surging demand.
When she sat down with other donors waiting their turn, the conversation kept returning to the same thing.
"Every time we talked, the feeling was: donating blood right now means saving someone who might be your neighbour or your relative."
Casualty numbers rose faster than hospitals could absorb, with injuries requiring repeated transfusions, acute haemorrhage, burns, compound fractures, pushing demand beyond any routine supply.
Some strikes directly hit medical facilities or damaged the infrastructure used to transport and store blood, disrupting distribution at the moment it was most needed.
Hospitals found themselves managing multiple critical patients simultaneously, each requiring several units within a 24-hour window.
Dr Hassan Sadeghi, an emergency physician at a Tehran hospital, described what that looked like from inside.
"In one day, we had three patients who needed close to six blood units in 24 hours, a demand that exceeded our current stock," he shared with The New Arab.
Updates came in constantly from donation centres reporting movement, but demand still outpaced supply.
"The problem isn't only the shortage," Dr Hassan added. "It's the simultaneous arrival of so many critical cases at the same time. That is what makes the donations so important to continuing our work. When we passed through the operating rooms, we felt the real pressure: every unit of blood given means one more life."
Dr Leila Tabrizi, a physician supervising a donation unit in west Tehran, had been watching the queues form since the first public appeal.
"The demand for blood, especially rare blood types, has not dropped for a single day since the beginning of the week," she told The New Arab.
Coordination between hospitals and donation centres became near-continuous, with centres receiving real-time messages from hospitals about which blood types were most urgently needed and redirecting donors accordingly.
"Donation centres have become a first line of defence against the blood shortage the medical sector is suffering during the war," Dr Leila added.
The donors
Arash Karimi drove from Qom to stand in line at a donation centre after hearing about a severe shortage in the city's hospitals from the first days of the airstrikes. While waiting, he spoke with others in the queue who had already donated to ordinary campaigns.
"They said the situation now is like a national mobilisation," Arash shared.
One of them had heard from a doctor at a nearby hospital that AB-negative was in critical shortage, leaving some urgent surgeries waiting. "When we sat one by one to have our blood drawn," Arash continued, "the atmosphere was charged with anxiety and genuine intention to help others. Because every drop of blood makes us feel we are easing the burden in the hospitals."
Nasrin Mirza came to a Tehran centre after days of news reports describing overwhelmed emergency wards. Around her in the queue, she counted students, office workers, and elderly women.
The doctor who carried out the pre-donation check told them there was a shortage in some of the most requested blood types, and that the appeals were coming precisely because the number of injured patients was rising day by day.
A volunteer near her said, "Every blood donation can change a final outcome in an operating room." She was still thinking about those words when she left.
Fatima Kashfi has worked in a Tehran blood transfusion centre for several years. What she has seen since the escalation is without precedent.
"Many come after hearing official medical appeals and media calls, saying they want to help anyone who needs blood to save their life," Fatima told The New Arab.
She watches donors leave after the screening and returns when they are able. "We sometimes have to run quick tests and direct donors according to the blood types most requested in messages we receive from hospitals. Every donation today is not just for one patient; it is to support a health system facing unprecedented pressure," she added.
Some cities have organised campaigns directing donors to the most affected hospitals. The challenge everywhere has been the same: the number of injured keeps climbing, the rare blood types keep running short, and the gap between what is needed and what is available does not close.
Social media has functioned as an informal coordination layer where official channels have been slow or disrupted.
Videos of long queues, posts from donors, hashtags pushing others to act, this non-institutional activity has driven awareness and footfall in ways the formal system could not have managed alone.
In a country where the internet has been throttled since the war began, those videos have circulated anyway, on VPNs, on Telegram, person to person.
The appeals continue. So do the queues.
Mahmoud Aslan is an Iranian journalist based in Tehran
This story was published in collaboration with Egab