Nearly 38,000 Iranians have crossed into eastern Turkey through the Bazargan land border since hostilities with Israel began, Turkish Interior Ministry officials said Tuesday, a figure that has more than doubled in the past ten days and is straining shelter capacity in Agri and Van provinces as governors there reopened former earthquake-response sites to absorb the inflow.

The figures, presented at an afternoon briefing in Ankara by Deputy Interior Minister Munir Karaloglu, were the first official Turkish tally since the war’s start and confirmed what aid workers and Iranian dual nationals had been describing for weeks: that the long, switch-backed highway running from Tabriz over the Bazargan pass had quietly become one of the principal civilian exits from Iran, especially for families with chronic-care needs and for those holding second passports.

“What we are seeing at Bazargan is not a single wave,” Karaloglu said. “It is a steady, daily movement of perhaps 1,500 to 2,000 people, most of them with documents in order, many of them traveling with elderly relatives or with prescriptions for medication they could not refill in Iran. Our posture is to admit them, to register them, to provide for them, and to coordinate with UNHCR.”

The minister said Turkey had not yet activated its temporary-protection regime, the framework first deployed for Syrians beginning in 2011, but that an interministerial working group had been authorized to draft a parallel instrument if the rate of arrivals climbed materially above present levels. Roughly 4,000 of the new arrivals had already been moved onward to relatives in Istanbul, Ankara and Bursa, he added; the remainder were being housed in repurposed dormitories, hotels requisitioned at off-season rates and, in two cases, in tented sites originally erected after the 2023 Kahramanmaras earthquakes.

At Bazargan itself, the picture described by travelers and by aid workers reached by telephone was one of long queues but functioning processing. Vehicles backed up several kilometers on the Iranian side through the weekend, and a UNHCR liaison present at the Turkish customs hall said registration was being completed in roughly four to six hours per family, longer for those without identity documents in hand.

“It is orderly, but it is heavy,” said Selin Aydin, a UNHCR protection officer assigned to the border. “Many of these are people who, three weeks ago, did not think of themselves as refugees. They are pensioners. They are dentists. They are people whose pharmacy stopped getting deliveries. The change in their lives has happened very fast.”

The arrivals, by UNHCR’s preliminary tabulations, skew older than displacement flows in earlier Middle Eastern conflicts. Roughly 28 percent of those registered at Bazargan since March 20 are over the age of 60, compared with single-digit shares in the early Syrian outflows, the agency said. Aid workers attributed the pattern to the targeting profile of the war so far — strikes on industrial and energy nodes near Isfahan, Bushehr, Arak and Ahvaz, rather than on residential districts — which has prompted chronic-care patients in particular to seek exits as electricity, water and medication supplies in their home cities have degraded.

Iranian state media has not commented in detail on the Bazargan outflow, though the semi-official Mehr news agency on Monday acknowledged that “a number of citizens with overseas family connections” had taken advantage of the agency’s facilitation of expedited passport renewals. A spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, Esmaeil Baghaei, asked at his weekly briefing about reports of the crossings, said the movement was “a temporary phenomenon” and that returnees would be welcomed once “the imposed pressures of the Zionist regime have been answered.”

In Van, the largest Turkish provincial capital near the border, hospitals have begun rotating Iranian physicians who arrived in recent weeks through ambulatory clinics, partly to relieve pressure on Turkish medical staff and partly to make consultations available in Farsi. Dr. Ferhat Yildiz, who heads the internal medicine department at Van Yuzuncu Yil University Hospital, said his unit had absorbed two cardiologists and an endocrinologist from Tabriz on temporary credentialing arrangements, and that all three had volunteered immediately.

“They walked in on a Tuesday morning and asked where the dialysis ward was,” Yildiz said. “I had a patient on the table within an hour. This is the human side of it. People bring what they have.”

The Turkish public response, broadly, has been quieter than the polarized reactions that accompanied earlier refugee flows. Mayors in Agri, Igdir and Van — across party lines — issued a joint statement Sunday calling on Ankara to ensure that the costs of shelter, schooling and primary care were borne by the federal budget rather than by municipal coffers, and several civil-society groups in Istanbul have begun organizing apartment-share programs for arriving families with school-aged children. A small far-right protest in Ankara on Saturday drew fewer than 200 participants and was uneventful, according to local press accounts.

Diplomats in Ankara said the Turkish posture reflected a calculated bet that the war would not last beyond the spring and that the Iranian inflow would prove finite, with most arrivals either returning home or onward-migrating to Europe within months. Whether that bet held would depend, Western officials said, on the outcome of the Islamabad mediation track and on whether energy and water systems inside Iran continued to degrade in coming weeks.

UNHCR’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, Rema Jamous Imseis, who visited Bazargan on Monday, said the agency would expand its presence at the crossing to six staff from two by next week and was negotiating with Turkish authorities for access to two of the overflow shelters in Agri province. The agency’s revised flash appeal, raised last week to $720 million, remained 34 percent funded as of Tuesday, she said.

“The window in which this stays manageable is open,” Imseis said in remarks to reporters at the crossing. “It will not stay open by itself.”

A second UNHCR field assessment, focused on the smaller Tamarchin crossing into Iraqi Kurdistan and on reports of family separations among arrivals there, is scheduled for later this week. Turkish officials said they would publish updated daily totals from Bazargan beginning Wednesday.