Israel’s Bombs Have Stopped Falling, But Iranians Still Face an Uncertain Future

Iranians are waking up from what feels like a nightmare.

For 12 days, Israel bombarded their country with missiles, air strikes, and drone attacks. It hit homes, hospitals, and offices, killing around 1,000 people. Thousands more were injured, and tens of thousands lost their homes. Parents have been left without children, and children without parents. One family lost 12 members in an Israeli airstrike.

Tehran, the nation’s sprawling capital city of 10 million, was hit the hardest.

Bombed-out buildings and debris-filled playgrounds bear testament to the damage caused by Israel’s unprovoked surprise attack. Dozens, if not hundreds of bodies, remain buried under the rubble.

Funerals take place constantly in Behesht-e-Zahra, the vast graveyard in the desert plains south of Tehran. In stifling heat, families gather to mourn loved ones. Among the dead are students, janitors, nurses, scientists, housewives, soldiers, doctors, and others.

Every part of Tehran was touched by the war. Bombs hit posh neighborhoods and working-class ones alike. They struck airports and gas depots, military bases and government ministries.

But now, as they clear the wreckage, Iranians can breathe a sigh of relief. They are finally able to wake up without having to check if their loved ones had been killed the night before.

Maryam, a sociologist in her 60s who asked for anonymity to protect her from potential government retaliation for speaking to U.S. media, watched the war from her apartment atop a hill in north Tehran. She saw explosions pound the city from her window, plumes of smoke signalling the location of strikes. When I talked to her a few days after the ceasefire was announced, she had trouble believing the war was really over.

“It feels like we are stuck in barzakh [purgatory],” she told me over the phone. “We’re afraid that at any moment, the bombs could start falling again.”

She described the war as a collective national trauma that has left lasting effects on Iranians’ psyche and sense of well-being.

“Everyone in Iran is wounded,” she told me.

The fear was amplified by the terror Iranians experienced during the last 24 hours of the conflict, when the United States directly entered the war by launching strikes on nuclear sites outside Qom and Isfahan, provoking widespread fears of radioactive contamination.

After the bombing, Trump promptly declared that he had negotiated a ceasefire. But Israel took advantage of the final hours of the war to pound Iran on a scale not seen over the 12-day conflict. At least 100 people were killed in those final hours, and more than 1,000 wounded.

79 people were killed in the attack, including incarcerated people, prison social workers, neighbors out for a walk, soldiers guarding the prison, and family members of prisoners who had come to post bail.

Reyhaneh, an architect in her 30s, spent the bombardment in the basement of the house where she lives with her mother in east Tehran. They were unable to leave the city during the war. Her mother is in recovery from cancer. She needed to be driven to follow-up doctor’s appointments related to her brain surgery, even as bombs rained down across the city.

Reyhaneh had been living in the apartment above her mother’s, but when the war started, she began spending nights at her mother’s home.

“I thought it was better so that we could be in touch if something happened,” she told me over the phone. What she meant was that if a bomb fell on their home, at least they would be close to each other: in life, injury, or death. They were afraid not only of a direct attack, but also of a nearby explosion showering them with shrapnel or broken glass.

Buildings in their neighborhood were bombed repeatedly, and hundreds of homes were damaged. By the end, the bombing had become so heavy — and so close — that they moved to the basement. On the last night before the ceasefire, Reyhaneh wrote in her diary:

It’s my birthday today. The bombing is so heavy I’m sure we’re going to die in this basement tonight. On my gravestone, they’ll write the same date for my birthday and for the day I died.

A few hours later, the ceasefire came into effect. Reyhaneh added to her entry:

Just before sunrise, everything became calm. The sky brightened, the nightingales began to sing, the pigeons flew above us, and even the crows joined the symphony of light. An atmosphere so beautiful, I could almost imagine that I was about to start the best day of my life, or that the cars were of people just going to work, not terrified and fleeing airstrikes.

I almost can’t believe that my city is at war, and that we’re emerging from our underground shelter to a beautiful sunrise. I am trying to forget that earlier scene of missiles and explosions.

Pain and Sorrow

Try as hard as they might to forget the horrors of those two weeks, the people who survived Israel and the U.S.’s bombardment now live in a changed country.

Trauma reshapes people. Collective traumas reshape nations.

The last time bombs fell on Tehran was in the 1980s, when Saddam Hussein launched a surprise invasion with Western support, which turned into eight solid years of war between Iran and Iraq. A million people died in the conflict.

The Islamic Republic had just been established after the 1979 Revolution. It consolidated power, cracking down on dissent and mobilizing its supporters in an existential battle to defend the nation. For years, the government used the war as an example of why Iranians should not trust foreign powers, pointing out that countries that championed Iranians’ human rights on the world stage like the United States had actively supported Saddam when he slaughtered Iranians with chemical weapons.

But in recent decades, authorities changed their tone. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei gave his blessing to direct negotiations with the United States, leading to the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran on one side and the U.S., other members of the UN Security Council, Germany, and the European Union more broadly on the other. Trump violated the deal in 2018 and ripped up the accord.

Over the last six months, Iran returned to the negotiating table — only for the U.S. to betray its word again, letting its ally launch an unprovoked attack.

The war will have major long-term effects on Iranians. But only time will tell how those effects might play out politically.

The first few days after the ceasefire, many Iranians rejoiced. Those who had left the city returned home, finding destroyed buildings all along the highways and rubble in the streets of their neighborhoods. Now that the daily bombardment has ended, many are just now taking stock of the damage the war caused.

That includes journalists, who are now able to report on the details of deadly strikes previously shrouded in the fog of war.

For example, on the final day of the war, Israel bombed Evin Prison, where hundreds of political prisoners are held. Israeli authorities boasted about the attack and even posted fabricated AI footage to celebrate. It took a week for a preliminary death toll to be released: 79 people were killed in the attack, including incarcerated people, prison social workers, neighbors out for a walk, soldiers guarding the prison, and family members of prisoners who had come to post bail.

As individual stories have filtered out, the initial joy at the news of a ceasefire has transformed into mourning for the lives cut short as well as the horrors that survivors collectively experienced.

Just days after the war ended, the Islamic month of Muharram began. Among Shia Muslims, the first 10 days are marked with mourning ceremonies dedicated to the early Islamic figure Imam Hussein, culminating on the day of Ashura.

In Iran, Imam Hussein is commemorated as a martyr to justice and freedom, slaughtered by a corrupt caliph along with his followers and family in the Battle of Karbala. During nightly poetic recitations, worshippers cry as they listen to the story of Hussein’s killing.

This year, the recitations are full of verses mourning Iran and its people killed in the war, in a collective outpouring of national grief. Religious reciters close to the government have chanted to crowds of thousands in the streets of Tehran: “In my heart and soul, You will remain, my homeland, You are a holy shrine, Oh Iran!”

But the public displays of mourning are not limited to those close to the government. Besat Heyat, a religious association in the city of Yazd in central Iran, has long used the Muharram holidays to critique government policies. By drawing parallels between the injustice faced by Islamic heroes of the past and government repression in the present, the reciters powerfully fuse religious rhetoric with discourses of liberation.

After the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests demanded political change in 2022 after the death of Jina Mahsa Amini in police custody, Besat Heyat’s condemnations of government repression were so direct that they were banned from performing.

This year, their poetic recitations have become nationalistic:

Oh Iran, my beloved homeland, Oh gateway of love, Union of my body and soul, I say this now with great difficulty: My homeland is full of pain and sorrow! … As long as enemy armies besiege you, My heart will never rest…

The sense of righteous anger that Iranians across the political spectrum are feeling is magnified by the shock of the international community’s lack of response to Israel’s widespread targeting of civilians.

“War is a terrible thing. Every night, we were unsure if we’d die or not,” Fereshteh, a retired journalist who similarly asked for anonymity to protect against potential government retaliation, told me. “Especially because the country bombing us is currently committing a genocide in Gaza.”

Fereshteh was employed for three decades at IRIB, Iran’s national broadcaster, primarily in children’s programming and sports broadcasting. On the fourth day of the war, she was driving when she reached a roadblock. In the distance, she saw that IRIB’s iconic glass building had been hit; journalists were live on the air when an Israeli bomb struck their office.

“It was a weird feeling, seeing the place I worked for so many years bombed like that,” she told me. “I thought of my coworkers inside the building — not just the anchors, but the technical staff, the editors, everyone else who was part of the broadcast.”

“I couldn’t believe it. How could Israel bomb journalists at work? They were defenseless civilians! Israel said that IRIB was state propaganda; but every state television defends its own country’s interests. Israeli journalists are under the supervision of the Israeli government. Do other countries have a right to kill them?”

Israel’s targeting of media workers in Iran followed years of killing journalists in Palestine and Lebanon with seeming impunity. Since beginning its assault on Gaza in 2023, it has killed more than 200 journalists in the tiny besieged territory alone.

Fereshteh expressed her frustration that few governments had condemned Israel’s attack or targeting of civilians. She also expressed anger at Iranians outside of the country who supported the war or believed Israel’s rationale that it was trying to “free” Iranians from their ruling government.

“Israel killed Iranian civilians. Israel is not a friend of Iran. It is up to the Iranian people to decide whether or not to change the regime, not any foreign government or Reza Pahlavi, who has never done anything good for Iranians beside telling them to go out on the streets and get shot so he can come back and take over,” Fereshteh explained, referencing the son of the deposed Shah of Iran who supported Israel’s attack and has long claimed to be the person best poised to mount an opposition to the government.

“The Iranian government has caused many hardships for Iranian people, as have international sanctions. But during a foreign attack, our only duty is to stand up to the foreign enemy who started the aggression.”

An Inclusive Future? Or a More Repressive One?

Throughout the war, Iranians came together in ways big and small to help each other survive. They opened their houses to strangers fleeing the war, offered free food and water to the displaced, and helped Iranians abroad get in touch with displaced relatives.

Even after Israel bombed ambulances, first aid workers continued to rescue the wounded. Doctors made house calls to elderly people unable to escape. Mutual aid groups formed to help those stuck at home. This continued after the ceasefire; numerous architectural firms, for example, offered to help Iranians rebuild their homes free of charge.

If Israel hoped to tear Iranian society apart, Iranians have given every indication that it failed to do so.

Iran’s government declared victory at the end of the conflict. By its estimation, two of the world’s strongest, nuclear-armed militaries had vowed to force Iran to surrender — and were unsuccessful. Iran survived, as did the Islamic Republic. The war also seemed to validate the narrative Khamenei and his supporters have long argued: the West can’t be trusted, and Iran must always be ready for war because it could erupt at any time.

While the negotiations the U.S. and Iran had been engaged in before the conflict seemed to portend potential demilitarization over time through improved relations, Israel’s gamble — and Trump’s support — obliterated this hope. Trump has said he wants to return to the negotiating table. But Iranian authorities have made it clear they no longer trust Americans to keep their word.

It does not help that factions within both the U.S. and Israel have been vocal about their desire to bring about regime change in Iran. Israel repeatedly invoked Iranians’ struggle for freedom as part of their rationale for the war; Netanyahu even chanted “Woman, Life, Freedom” at the end of one of his speeches while missiles were falling on Tehran. For Iranian activists who supported the movement and have been active in their country’s struggle for democracy for years, Israel’s purported championing of the movement only undermined their struggle.

Maryam, the sociologist, laughed when I asked her about Israeli officials’ calls for Iranians to rise up against their government: “How can we protest when we’re running from bombs?”

Indeed, foreign military intervention seems to have only strengthened authorities’ resolve to re-establish control.

Since the war’s end, many Iranians have criticized the security failures of the government, especially the Revolutionary Guards. It became clear during the war that Israeli intelligence agents had established an extensive network and surveillance inside the country. Many attacks, including by drone, were launched from within Iran in collaboration with Israeli intelligence.

During the war, security forces began arresting hundreds of Iranians on suspicion of spying for Israel, and executed some suspects. Today, the government has set up checkpoints all over Tehran, as security forces hunt down people they accuse of helping Israel during the war.

Their suspicion has often focused on individuals from communities already marginalized: working class people, Afghan refugees, and members of ethnic minorities, especially Kurds, who have been scapegoated. There is fear that authorities will crack down on dissent more broadly as they try to control the narrative.

But there is another possibility.

Many Iranians hope that authorities will recognize that the war has affected all Iranians equally — its supporters and its opponents, religious people and nonreligious people alike.

Activist Ali Abdi, a political prisoner usually held in Evin, was temporarily released before the war started. He wrote in a post on Instagram that Iranian state TV had promoted a discourse of solidarity among all Iranians during the war, highlighting that there was no difference between Iranians when it came to defending the homeland. Whereas previously, state broadcasting tended to address Iranians as either pro-revolution or as counterrevolutionaries, this discourse of solidarity was far more inclusive, he argued.

“Among those killed were women who don’t wear hijab, nonreligious men, and ordinary people (housewives/athletes/shopkeepers) who have … created a new representation of the image of the martyr in collective memory,” he said.

“The images that will stay with us from the war — of the empathy shown by people, the diversity of the people frightened and hurt, and the resistance that formed — bear no relation to divisive dichotomies.”

But Abdi also warned that nationalist discourse could always have a dark side, potentially justifying new restrictions on Iranians and empowering xenophobic discourses, especially against Afghans, the largest migrant group in the country. He feared that this could fuel new types of inequality — and erase the fact that Afghans had suffered and died during the war alongside Iranians.

There are around 3 to 5 million Afghans in Iran, many born and raised there. Before the war, a mass deportation drive of undocumented Afghans had already forced hundreds of thousands to leave. Since the war’s end, many more have been detained and deported.

The long-term effects of the war on Iranian society will continue to take shape over time.

They will also be tied to the war’s global effects. Israel and the U.S.’s assault on Iran has established a terrifying new precedent: unprovoked wars as an acceptable form of geopolitics. This, on top of Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza, will undoubtedly reshape our world order. Indeed, the lack of accountability for Israel’s war crimes was no doubt part of the reason why Israel felt it could expand the war to Iran without suffering any consequences.

As Iranians continue burying the bodies of their loved ones and rebuilding their broken lives and homes, they will be watching not only how their own government reacts — but also how the world responds.