Information trickling out of Iran on Tuesday suggests that a crackdown by authorities to end more than two weeks of widespread anti-government protests has likely been far more deadly than activists outside the country have reported. With phone lines opening back up for calls from inside the Islamic Republic, two sources, including one inside Iran, told CBS News on Tuesday that at least 12,000, and possibly as many as 20,000 people have been killed. 

Britain’s Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said in Parliament on Tuesday that the U.K. government believed there “may have been 2,000 people killed, there have been more. My fear is that the number may prove to be significantly higher.”

The truth has been incredibly difficult to piece together due to Iran’s hardline rulers cutting off internet access and phone service in the country for the last five days. While a complete internet shutdown in Iran remained in place for a fifth day, some Iranians were able to make phone calls out of the country on Tuesday, though it was still not possible to call into Iran from outside. 

A source inside Iran who was able to call out told CBS News on Tuesday that activist groups working to compile a full death toll from the protests, based on reports from medical officials across the country, believed the toll was at least 12,000, and possibly as high as 20,000.

The same source said security forces were visiting the many private hospitals across Tehran, threatening staff to hand over the names and addresses of those being treated for injuries sustained in the protests.

CBS News has not been able to independently verify the massive death toll indicated by the source, which is some many times larger than the numbers reported by most activist groups independently in recent days — though those groups have always made it clear that their tallies are likely underestimated.

The opposition Iran International television network said Tuesday that its information suggested about 12,000 people were killed. A source in Washington with contacts in Iran told CBS News on Tuesday that a credible source had told him the toll was likely between 10,000 and 12,000.

Iranian officials have not provided regular official estimates of overall deaths from the unrest. Reuters quoted an unnamed Iranian official Tuesday as saying about 2,000 people had been  killed since the protests began on Dec. 28, and blaming the violence on foreign influenced “terrorists,” even suggesting that agitators had been paid to foment chaos.

CBS News has verified that video posted online Tuesday shows the bodies of at least 366 and likely more than 400 people killed amid the protest piled up at a morgue in a Tehran suburb. The video appears to show forensic personnel documenting gruesome injuries on the bodies, and crowds of people seemingly trying to identify the dead. The injuries visible are extensive and include gunshot wounds, “birdshot” shotgun wounds, gashes and other severe injuries. 

New video shows badly injured bodies lined up at morgue

An Iranian activist and blogger who identifies himself only as Vahid Online first posted the shocking 16-minute clip. Vahid said it was sent to him from a source who traveled about 600 miles to upload the video amid the communications blackout. 

The graphic video shows people with what appear to be injuries caused by bullets and shotgun pellets, as well as other wounds, and piles of bloody clothing inside the morgue compound.

The protests — which drew warnings of a U.S. military intervention by President Trump — were sparked in late December by anger over a new spike in the cost of living in Iran’s sanctions-hobbled economy. They quickly grew into mass rallies in all of Iran’s 31 provinces, with tens of thousands of people chanting for the downfall of the country’s Islamic rulers.

Even the lower death toll reported by Cooper in Britain on Tuesday, if confirmed, would surpass any officially reported casualty figure from past anti-regime protests in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which brought the current government to power.

When Mr. Trump was asked Tuesday how many people have been killed in the protests in Iran, he responded, “Nobody’s been able to give me an accurate number.”

Mr. Trump warned multiple times as the protests escalated last week that if the Iranian regime killed protesters, the U.S. would take action, without ever specifying a red line that might prompt a response, or what the response might be.

President Trump tells Iranian protesters help is on the way

“Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING — TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price. I have cancelled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY,” Mr. Trump said in a social media post on Tuesday.

Again he offered no details about what help the U.S. might provide to Iran’s long-stifled domestic opposition.

The president’s national security team was scheduled to hold a meeting at the White House on Tuesday to discuss his options, according to several sources familiar with the matter. It was unclear whether the president himself would attend. He has been briefed on a wide array of military and covert tools that could be used against Iran, well beyond conventional airstrikes, according to two Pentagon officials who spoke to CBS News on the condition of anonymity to discuss national security matters. 

A crackdown “much worse than we can even imagine”

“The information that we are receiving shows that the violent crackdown [against] the protests has probably been much worse than we can even imagine,” said Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, who leads the Norway-based activist organization Iran Human Rights. 

“The whole international community’s red lines have been crossed,” said Amiry-Moghaddam. “We have a mechanism called responsibility to protect civilians against grave human rights violations, against mass killings … so not only [the] United States, not only President Trump, but the European Union, basically all countries have a responsibility to stop these atrocities.”

He didn’t call for U.S. military action, but urged world powers to “provide Iranians with more means to communicate with the world, because this is what the regimes do — they shut off the internet. Basically, it’s like solitary confinement. They put Iranian people into solitary confinement and start torturing and killing them.”

He told CBS News his organization had received a video Monday night showing the aftermath of one purported attack by security forces that left 75 people dead in Mazandaran province, about a three-hour drive north of Tehran. Amiry-Moghaddam said he could not share the video or specific town where the alleged assault occurred as the information “can be tracked,” and would thus endanger his sources. 

“This is what indicates that the extent has been much worse than we anticipated,” said Amiry-Moghaddan. 

Internet access and text messaging services were still blocked in Iran on Tuesday, leaving largely in place the blackout initiated on the evening of Jan. 8, when thousands of people appeared to heed a call by Iran’s exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi to make their voices heard. 

The protests — and the security forces’ action against them — appeared to escalate sharply for a couple of days from that evening.

On Tuesday, Iran’s police chief claimed the protests had been ordered from outside the country and that “terrorists” paid to cause unrest had been confronted inside Iran.

Iranians want “anyone who can remove the Islamic Republic”

Amiry-Moghaddan told CBS News many Iranians wouldn’t believe that narrative from their leaders.

“Iranian people are so fed up with the regime, and so desperate to come out of this system,” he said. “I remember that I used to ask many people, with different backgrounds, ‘Who would you support?’ And all of them basically say that we would support anyone who can remove the Islamic Republic. Iran is a country with a lot of different kinds of people, different opinions. Some would like to have monarchies, some are opposed to monarchy, but I think the priority is to remove this regime.”

Pahlavi has said he’s ready to return to lead Iran, despite not having been there since his father, the U.S.-backed shah, fled almost 50 years ago amid intense public outrage over his rule. He told CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell on Monday that the Iranian people “need action to be taken.”

“The best way to ensure that there will be less people killed in Iran is to intervene sooner, so this regime finally collapses and puts an end to all the problems that we are facing,” he said. 

Pahlavi said he has communicated with the Trump administration, but he didn’t reveal any details of those conversations. 

Amiry-Moghaddan said an “absolute majority” of Iranians “don’t want the regime, like more than 80%.”

But he said that 80% was “roughly divided into three groups, those who would like to have [the] shah’s son, those who oppose a monarchy, and those who haven’t made up their minds.”

BEIRUT — The Trump administration waded into a regional debate over the Muslim Brotherhood on Tuesday, designating the Lebanese, Jordanian and Egyptian chapters of the transnational Sunni Islamist group as terrorist organizations.

The group founded in the 1920s in Egypt inspired Islamist political movements around the region.

Its ideology has been both popular and divisive in the Arab and Muslim world. The Brotherhood’s leaders say it renounced violence decades ago and seeks to set up Islamic rule through elections and other peaceful means, but some of the group’s offshoots have armed wings. Critics, including a number of autocratic governments across the region, view it as a threat.

Here’s how the group started and where it stands now.

The Muslim Brotherhood rose as a pan-Arab Islamist political movement, founded in Egypt in 1928 by a school teacher-turned-ideologue Hassan al-Banna. He believed that Islamic teachings should be the basis for governance.

In its early days, the group largely focused on providing social services, but it later turned to militancy, with an armed wing that fought against British colonialists and Israel. It was implicated in the assassination of Egyptian Prime Minister Mahmoud Fahmi al-Nokrashi in 1948 after he outlawed the group. Two months later, al-Banna was assassinated in Cairo.

After Egypt’s 1952 military coup, the Brotherhood was accused of an assassination attempt against President Gamal Abdel-Nasser, who retaliated by executing prominent Brotherhood ideologue Sayyed Qutb and imprisoning thousands of other members.

The group witnessed a revival in the 1970s under then-President Anwar Sadat, who tolerated the Brotherhood and used it as a counterweight to leftist opponents. The group formally foreswore violence.

During the 30-year rule of autocrat Hosni Mubarak, the Brotherhood was technically banned but also tolerated. By 2005 it had become Egypt’s strongest political opposition group, winning a fifth of the seats in parliament.

The Brotherhood rose to power following elections in Egypt a year after the 2011 popular uprising that toppled Mubarak. But the group fueled opponents’ fears that it aimed to monopolize power.

After giant protests over Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi’s divisive rule, the Egyptian army ousted the group in 2013, crushing it in a bloody crackdown.

The authorities later outlawed the group and labeled it a terrorist organization. Authorities under President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi have cracked down heavily on Brotherhood members and those suspected of links to the group, jailing thousands.

The Brotherhood’s leader, or supreme guide, Mohammed Badie, remains behind bars in Egypt under several life sentences, the last of which was upheld in July 2021. Nearly all of the group’s senior leaders have been imprisoned or live in exile.

After its founding in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood developed into a transnational network with chapters across the Middle East.

Some of those have engaged in armed uprisings against their own governments or fought against Israel. In 1982, the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria staged an anti-government rebellion, launching attacks that targeted military officers, state institutions and ruling party offices.

In February 1982, then-Syrian President Hafez Assad ordered an assault on the city of Hama to quell the unrest. Between 10,000 to 40,000 people were killed or disappeared in the government offensive that left the city in ruins.

The Palestinian militant group Hamas, which launched the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel triggering the war in Gaza, has roots in the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas was formed in December 1987 in Gaza, several days after the outbreak of the first intifada, or Palestinian uprising, against Israel. It called for armed resistance and for setting up an Islamic state in all of historic Palestine.

In its founding charter, Hamas defined itself as a Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood.

The Lebanese branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Jamaa al-Islamiya (or the Islamic Group) is a Sunni Muslim political party but also has an armed wing. After the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, its armed wing joined forces with the Shiite militant group Hezbollah and launched rockets across the border into Israel.

The al-Jamaa al-Islamiya leader Mohammed Takkoush told The Associated Press at the time that his group and Hezbollah supported different sides in regional conflicts and Syria and Yemen but put their differences aside to fight Israel.

Sunni regional powers Turkey and Qatar have been sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology, while other Sunni powers in the region — including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt — see the group as a threat and have cracked down on it.

Earlier this year, Jordan announced a sweeping ban on the Brotherhood that could include shutting down the country’s largest opposition party, after accusing the Islamist group of planning attacks. The monarchy banned the Brotherhood a decade ago but officially licensed a splinter group and continued to tolerate the Islamic Action Front while restricting some of its activities.

The U.S. says its chapters in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt engage in or facilitate and support violence and destabilization campaigns that harm their own regions, United States citizens and United States interests.

The State Department designated the Lebanese branch a foreign terrorist organization, the most severe of the labels, which makes it a criminal offense to provide material support to the group. The Jordanian and Egyptian branches were listed by Treasury as specially designated global terrorists for providing support to Hamas.

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Mednick reported from Tel Aviv, Israel.