5:30 a.m. I emerge into consciousness—hazy, alert, terrified by the thought that in the three hours of fragile sleep I managed, I may have lost a friend back home. Israel has launched a sudden and staggering military assault on Iran. The full scope of the operation remains unknown, but the target is unmistakable: the strike began in the heart of Tehran, a city of over ten million people—seventeen million including its vast sprawl. For many of us, this is the moment we’ve feared for decades: that the shadow of war, long hovering at the edge of imagination, would one day cross the threshold into reality. Now it has.
I grab my phone and squint through the needling brightness to read the first headline—a quote from Defense Minister Katz:“We will strike the sites and continue to peel the skin off the Iranian snake in Tehran and everywhere.” Peeling the skin—how far does it go? Peeling air defenses? The sound barrier of a city never built to absorb explosions? Empty grocery shelves? Hacked banks and frozen accounts? I remember haunting footage from Gaza: a field covered with the clothes of Palestinians, stripped before arrest—like peels of vanished lives. What’s left to see, to know, when everything’s been peeled away?
5:37 a.m. Footage shows monstrous fires at fuel depots—one in the northwest of Tehran, the other in the south—set ablaze by Israel the night before. The sky is blackened into an unnatural dawn. My brother calls it psychological warfare. Oil, fire, war. A reel begins to play in my mind: Qayyarah’s oil fields torched by ISIS, Kuwait burning for a year, tankers aflame at sea during the Iran–Iraq War. Oil as fuel for spectacle. Then the toxic aftermath: the barren soil, birds unable to open their wings, black water without reflection. I think of a woman in an old video from southern Iran, weeping as she said, “Since this blackness was discovered here, we’ve seen nothing but blackness.”
5:45 a.m. Rumors spread of an immediate evacuation order for Tehran, issued by Israel. How immediate is immediate? And where would they go? A city with no shelters, no clear roads out. Before I can search Israeli-run pages on X with shaky hands to confirm the news, I’m distracted by footage of another explosion in eastern Tehran. Then comes a barrage of videos showing blasts in densely populated neighborhoods: Shahrak Gharb, Sa’adat Abad, and then Pounak Square. I know people across all these neighborhoods. I’ve kissed, loved, cried with people here. Names blur with locations. My thoughts scatter like shrapnel. Who to call? And what to ask? Are you alive? A gnawing dread coils in my stomach.
6:10 a.m. Pro-Israeli Iranian outlets insist: only military targets. But injured civilians are already filling my screen. First face, a young flight attendant, unrelated to the regime, bright smile, now gone. Mehrnoush Hajisoltani. “If you’re lucky, there’s a body—these bombs shred everything.” She stares at me like the smiles from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria—faces I never knew alive but now recognize instantly. Faces I’ve memorized posthumously. How many dead bodies, caught half-smile, half-blink, can fit inside a living one?
6:16 a.m. Long lines are forming at gas stations across the city. Cars packed in tight, inching forward. No official announcement, no direction, not even the sound of sirens. The city responds to air raids by a shared instinct: move, stock up, escape if you can.
6:45 a.m. With the internet down, people begin sending audio clips of new explosions—dull thuds, then sharper cracks—reported in more neighborhoods: Amirabad, Fatemi, Sattarkhan, Amirieh. My mind zigzags between districts and memories. A café I loved. A street I walked. A rooftop where I once stood to watch the city breathe. The map unravels in my head, every corner pulling at me at once. I tell myself: we should organize, put together a statement, reach out to public figures for support. But I can’t move. I feel a paralysis in my limbs, my words.
Throughout all the street protests in Iran since 2009, I was filled with grief—but it was a grief in motion, carrying a will to live. The flow of people through the streets poured new blood into my veins, as if, even in loss after loss, I was an extension of a surging collective pulse. But this invasion—and the terror of what it might bring—drains me: of hope, of movement, of life. What’s awaiting us? Food shortages? Collapsed infrastructure? A military coup? Looting, warlords, drug lords? A broken state no regime—democratic or not—could rebuild in decades?
Each blast feels like a rupture in my nerves, the loss of a limb. I’m hollowed out, static, my weight dropped into my feet like cement. I feel sweat beads on my forehead, then a hot twist in my throat. Nausea. I walk to the bathroom and throw up bile. I remember that I haven’t eaten. I return and sit on the edge of my bed. Paralyzed. I can’t move. It’s as if the hopeful future once imagined through the 2022 street protests—through the chant Women, Life, Freedom—has collapsed in on itself: twisting, folding, swallowing a country into a chaos it cannot bear, a war it never asked for.
Photo by Amir Kholousi
7:18 a.m. Ahmadabad-Mostowfi neighborhood, on the edge of Tehran: two loud blasts, then smoke. The footage starts to blur; white plumes against blue sky, then black, spreading over rows of dense residential buildings. It loops like a nightmare, except it’s real. Where was it hit? Why that location? No one knows. This is the rhythm now: the sound, the shake, the smoke. Everything else—the victim, the cost, the future —remains unknown.
I start to learn the language of news from Iran: Israel F-35Is circling overhead, Israel pocket-sized UAVs planted near missile sites, Israel aerial tankers extending strike range, Israel-operated drone swarms, and Israel Spike NLOS missiles. If the weapons are unfamiliar, the narrative isn’t; yet again, Israel has launched an unhinged aggression in the rhetoric of defense. Destruction reframed as protection.
7:30 a.m. Israeli pages repeat the line: We are friends of the Iranian people. I keep scrolling, mindlessly, through footage of people filming from their windows, capturing pale vapor dissolving into the sky. In the hazy spreading smoke, one thing is clear: the Iran we knew is forever gone.