ERBIL, Iraq — At least 47 civilians have been killed and more than 130 wounded by unexploded ordnance and unstable munitions since the Iran-Israel ceasefire took effect on April 15, the United Nations Mine Action Service said Friday, as the accelerating pace of refugee returns continued to outrun clearance crews working along the Iran-Iraq border belt and across the worst-hit industrial districts of Tehran, Isfahan and Bushehr.

The agency, in a joint briefing with the Iraqi Directorate of Mine Action and the Iranian Red Crescent Society delivered from this Kurdish regional capital, said the casualty figure had roughly doubled in the past four days as families returning to neighborhoods struck during the six-week war disturbed unexploded missile components, cluster submunitions and damaged ammunition stocks in courtyards, fields and partially collapsed buildings. Children under 14 accounted for 19 of the dead and an estimated four in ten of the wounded.

“The shape of this casualty curve is not unusual after a high-intensity conflict, but the speed at which it is bending upward is,” said Paul-Henri Marchand, the U.N. Mine Action Service’s regional coordinator for the Iran response, speaking at a stone-floored briefing room beside Erbil’s emergency operations center. “Every additional day of unmanaged return adds new contact points between families and ordnance that nobody has yet cleared, marked or even mapped.”

Marchand said the agency had identified 312 priority sites across the four most affected Iranian provinces and another 84 across western and southern Iraq where Iranian counterstrikes or Houthi-linked rocket fire had left unstable remnants. Survey teams had reached only about a third of those sites since the ceasefire, he said, and full clearance, even on accelerated timelines, would take “many months, in some districts well over a year.”

The grim arithmetic was visible Thursday in the Iranian border town of Bazargan, where the U.N. refugee agency has registered more than 18,000 returnees since April 17. A 9-year-old boy was killed and his older sister critically wounded that morning when a piece of metal his family thought was part of a damaged satellite dish detonated as he tried to drag it from a vegetable plot behind the family’s rented apartment. Two neighbors who ran to help were also injured.

“We told them not to touch anything they could not identify,” said Farideh Karimi, a Red Crescent volunteer who reached the scene within 20 minutes. “But the truth is, after six weeks away, families come home and they want to clean their yard. They want to plant. They want their life back. Telling them to wait is not an instruction they can follow forever.”

In Iraq, the Mine Action Directorate reported four separate incidents on Wednesday and Thursday alone — two in Diyala province, one in Anbar and one in the outskirts of Basra — including the death of a 34-year-old farmer who struck a buried submunition with a tractor blade as he prepared a field for late-spring planting. A directorate spokesman, Brig. Gen. Falah al-Jubouri, said Iraqi teams trained during the Islamic State period were being redeployed from northern provinces to the Iranian-border belt but that fewer than 200 certified clearance technicians were available for an area that now required, by his estimate, three times that number.

“We are asking the international community for fast, flexible support,” al-Jubouri said. “We are not asking for advice. We have the expertise. We need the people, the detectors and the explosives to dispose of what we find.”

The picture inside Iran is harder to quantify. Iranian authorities have so far given U.N. survey teams access to four of the eleven provinces affected by Israeli strikes, with conditions and escorts that international officials described as workable but limited. Iranian state television on Wednesday aired footage from Isfahan of Revolutionary Guard engineers detonating recovered missile sections in a controlled blast outside the city, and a senior Interior Ministry spokesman, Mohsen Eftekhari, said Iran had requested international assistance in the form of equipment and training but not foreign clearance personnel on its soil.

“The Islamic Republic will manage this work with its own engineers, supplemented by partners we choose,” Eftekhari said in remarks carried by IRNA. “What we accept from international agencies are detectors, protective equipment and specialized disposal munitions. We do not accept foreign teams operating inside Iranian provinces.”

Israeli officials, asked in Jerusalem about the casualty totals, said the military had used precision munitions in all cases and that any unexploded items were the result of mechanical failure rates that were “among the lowest in the world.” A Defense Ministry spokeswoman, Maj. Tal Bar-Lev, said Israel had provided detailed strike coordinates and impact data to U.N. demining authorities through a back-channel established during the Doha exchange and was prepared to share additional technical information on specific munition types if requested.

The U.N. on Friday formally requested $214 million in emergency funding from member states for an accelerated 12-month clearance program covering Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, and called on returning families to delay re-entry to areas not yet cleared and clearly marked. Marchand said pledges so far covered roughly 40 percent of that request, with Germany, Japan, Norway and the United Arab Emirates among the early contributors.

A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the contribution was not yet public, said the United States would announce a $58 million package early next week, with a portion earmarked for clearance training in Iraq and Yemen and a separate tranche channeled through U.N. agencies for work inside Iran. The official said Washington expected European partners to match the U.S. figure within ten days.

For families along the corridor, the warnings sat uneasily alongside the simple pull of home. At a reception center in the Iraqi border town of Mehran, Hossein Sajjadi, a 41-year-old electrician returning to a village south of Ilam with his wife and three children, said he would heed instructions to avoid certain areas but had no intention of waiting weeks longer in a borrowed apartment. “We left in a hurry,” he said. “We have lived as guests for forty days. Now we are going home and we will be careful. That is all we can promise the children, and it is all the children want to hear.”

U.N. officials said the agency would deploy 60 additional survey personnel to the Iran-Iraq corridor by the end of next week and would begin door-to-door risk education in the four highest-casualty districts on Sunday.