The Iranian Red Crescent Society on Thursday put the number of people displaced inside Iran by the month-old war at roughly 1.1 million, releasing the first detailed provincial breakdown since hostilities began and laying out a picture of largely silent internal flight from cities ringed by industrial and nuclear-adjacent installations targeted in recent Israeli strikes.

The figures, presented at a midday briefing in Tehran by Red Crescent Secretary-General Mostafa Mohaghegh, described a population reshuffling itself toward rural districts and toward provinces away from the western and southwestern industrial belt. The largest outflows, the agency said, had been recorded around Isfahan, Natanz, Arak, Bushehr and the southern port of Bandar Abbas, with smaller but accelerating movements out of Tabriz and Kermanshah.

“We are no longer counting people who left after a strike,” Mohaghegh said. “We are counting people who left before one, on the assumption that a strike was coming. That is a different kind of displacement, and it is harder for us to plan for.”

The Red Crescent’s tally, compiled in coordination with provincial governors’ offices and crisis-management committees, marked the first time Iranian authorities had publicly conceded a seven-figure displacement total. Earlier government statements had described the impact of Israeli strikes in narrower terms, focusing on infrastructure damage rather than on civilian movement. Mohaghegh, asked about the apparent shift, said the figures reflected “what the families themselves are telling us at the registration tents,” and added that the agency had been authorized by the Supreme National Security Council to publish them.

International humanitarian access inside Iran has remained tightly constrained. The International Committee of the Red Cross said in a statement from Geneva that it had received approval for a four-person assessment team to travel to Isfahan and Hamadan provinces beginning next week, the first such mission since the start of the war, but that requests to visit Natanz and Bushehr had not been granted. A spokeswoman for the ICRC, Fatima Sator, said the organization was “in continuous contact with the relevant Iranian authorities” and that initial priorities would be hospitals, blood-bank logistics and dialysis-supply chains.

In Isfahan, where Israeli strikes over the prior ten days have hit a missile-production complex, a centrifuge-related workshop on the city’s western outskirts and a substation feeding the Natanz facility, residents described a phased emptying of neighborhoods closest to the affected sites. Mehdi Rezaei, 44, an engineer who left Isfahan with his wife and three children for a village near Yazd on Sunday, said the family had moved after a strike took out the lights across three districts for the better part of a day.

“It was not the explosions, really. It was the silence afterward,” Rezaei said by telephone. “No traffic. No bakeries open. My daughter has asthma and we could not run her nebulizer. We are not political people. We just need power and a pharmacy that is open.”

Around Bushehr, where the nuclear power plant has not been struck but where strikes on associated industrial sites along the Persian Gulf coast have damaged a desalination unit and a substation, water rationing has been in force since March 28. The city’s water utility said household supply had been cut to four hours per day and that tanker trucks were being dispatched to the southern districts, but residents reached by telephone described long lines and intermittent deliveries.

Iranian state media has portrayed the displacement in muted terms, emphasizing the role of neighbors and extended families in absorbing arrivals. The semi-official Tasnim news agency, in a report Thursday afternoon, said host families in Yazd, Kerman and Khorasan provinces had taken in “tens of thousands” of relatives from the affected areas, and that the Basij volunteer organization had set up communal kitchens at 240 sites across nine provinces. Mosques and Hosseiniyeh halls have been opened as overnight shelters in towns along the principal eastbound highways.

Energy and water systems have come under particular strain. The Ministry of Energy acknowledged Thursday that rolling outages were now in force across 11 provinces, with industrial users instructed to halt operations during peak afternoon hours and households limited to specified two-hour windows for high-draw appliances. Tehran has so far been largely spared from the worst rationing, but officials warned that natural-gas pressure to residential users could be reduced if a key compressor station damaged in last week’s strikes near Arak was not restored to service within ten days.

Outside analysts said the figures Tehran released were broadly consistent with what satellite-based population estimates and mobile-network traffic studies had been suggesting. Cyrus Ahmadi, a Vienna-based Iran analyst with the Institute for Regional Risk Studies, said the displacement pattern reflected a population making decisions on the basis of perceived target sets rather than on the basis of strike notifications, which Iranian authorities have largely declined to issue.

“People are looking at the map of where Israeli air operations have hit and they are extrapolating,” Ahmadi said. “If you live within ten kilometers of a defense-industrial node, or near a substation that feeds a known facility, you assume your turn is coming. That is a rational read of the last four weeks.”

The medium-term humanitarian picture, Ahmadi added, would likely be defined less by the strikes themselves than by the slow degradation of services, the medication supply chain in particular. The Iranian Red Crescent said imports of insulin and several cardiac medications had fallen sharply during March, a trend echoed in last week’s UN appeal from Geneva. A spokesperson for the U.S. Treasury Department, asked about reports of medical shortages, reiterated that humanitarian exemptions remained in force under existing general licenses and pointed to authorized channels for legitimate transactions.

In Geneva, UNHCR said it was not yet operating inside Iran but had begun preliminary planning for cross-border contingencies if the displacement spread to populations near the Turkish or Iraqi frontiers. A small but rising number of Iranian dual nationals have sought to exit overland in recent weeks, the agency said, mostly through the Bazargan crossing into Turkey.

Mohaghegh, the Red Crescent secretary-general, ended Thursday’s briefing with what he described as a procedural plea rather than a political one. The agency, he said, would issue updated provincial figures every 72 hours and was requesting that international donors route any humanitarian contributions through Iranian Red Crescent channels or through the ICRC. Officials said a follow-up briefing on hospital capacity and pharmaceutical stocks would be held early next week.