
Afraid of Israel, angry at the regime: Iranians on 12 days of war
Most visibly, there were reports that as many as one in three women were moving around Tehran with their heads uncovered. And then the Israeli strikes began, and Geranmayeh says 'all of that has now been turned upside down'.
Michael Safi hears how Iranians' relationship with the regime has changed in the last two weeks, as people have rallied around the flag, horrified by Israeli and US bombs, and at the same time expressed anger and shock at a government that seems to have been so little prepared for this war.
As a fragile ceasefire seems to hold, many are asking themselves the same question: what kind of Iran will come next?
With special thanks to the journalist Deepa Parent, who helped to contact people from across Iran.

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Iranian and Israeli media run footage 'showing enormous blast from IDF missile strike in Tehran, sending cars flying into the air'
Stunning security camera footage has revealed the utter devastation wrought on a square in Tehran by an Israeli air strike amid the Israeli Air Force's assault on Iran last month. The shocking clip, which emerged this week after Israel and Iran agreed to a ceasefire, purports to show the moment a pair of missiles struck Quds Square in the Tajrish neighbourhood of the Iranian capital on June 15. It was shared by Israeli and Iranian media and is yet to be verified by Iranian officials, but MailOnline has geolocated the footage. The first projectile scythed into a building on Bahodar Street opposite municipal offices, with the explosion spraying rubble across the road as a thick cloud of smoke and ash rose from the blast site. Seconds later, another projectile soared in and struck the middle of the road packed with traffic, mere feet away from the municipal building draped in the Islamic Republic's flag. The explosion was enormous. Cars were lifted off the ground and tossed aside by the sheer force of the blast. Huge chunks of tarmac and pieces of debris were ripped up and sent flying through the air. Moments later, they came raining back down, crushing cars and pelting helpless civilians reeling from the shockwave of the initial explosion. A second video shared on social media in the aftermath of the strikes showed horrified civilians gathered around the blast site. The entire road was flooded, with the missile having left a gigantic crater and destroyed water pipes and sewage systems. Iran's health ministry reported shortly afterwards that 12 people were killed in the punishing attacks, with a further 59 people injured. On June 12, the UN issued a resolution based on findings from its nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, that Iran was not complying with inspection regulations. That ruling came after IAEA inspectors claimed Tehran had some 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and could be weeks from having enough material to create several nuclear warheads. Israel began Operation Rising Lion less than 24 hours later, unleashing widespread attacks across Iran that it declared were necessary to prevent the Islamic Republic from obtaining nuclear weapons. Its warplanes relentlessly targeted Iran's nuclear sites, air defence systems and locations its intelligence found were housing high-ranking military officials and atomic scientists. Operatives from Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, had conducted a sabotage mission, knocking out some of Iran's air defence systems and missile launchers, opening the door for the air force to pound Tehran with impunity. In retaliation, Iran fired more than 550 ballistic missiles at Israel over the course of the almost fortnight-long war. Most were intercepted, but the sheer volume of projectiles - and the use of some hypersonic missiles - overwhelmed Israel's air defence systems. Some 28 people in Israel were killed by Tehran's missiles, but the death toll in Iran was much greater. This week, Iran's state-run IRNA news agency published updated casualty figures from its so-called 12-day war with Israel, declaring that 935 people were killed by Israeli bombs. It did not differentiate between civilian and military casualties. The conflict came to an end on June 25 after the United States Air Force (USAF) sent B-2 bombers armed with 30,000lb bunker-busting munitions and ship-launched Tomahawk missiles to batter Iran's nuclear sites at Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz. In the immediate aftermath of the strikes, US President Donald Trump insisted Iran 's nuclear facilities had been 'totally obliterated' and the Islamic Republic's chances of building a bomb erased. This week, the Pentagon declared that the attacks had set back Iran's nuclear programme by 1-2 years. Washington is now pushing Iran to enter negotiations over the future of its nuclear programme. Both the US and Israel have declared that Iran cannot be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. But Iran's parliament has voted to suspend its co-operation with the UN's nuclear watchdog amid concerns it could withdraw altogether from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which obligates Tehran to cooperate with IAEA inspections. IAEA Rafael Grossi sent a letter to Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi to propose a meeting and urge the Islamic Republic to cooperate. 'Resuming cooperation with the IAEA is key to a successful diplomatic agreement to finally resolve the dispute over Iran's nuclear activities,' Grossi said in a statement. 'I've written to Foreign Minister Araghchi stressing the importance of us working together and proposing to meet soon.' He said IAEA inspectors have remained in Iran and are ready to start working again. 'As I have repeatedly stated – before and during the conflict – nuclear facilities should never be attacked due to the very real risk of a serious radiological accident,' Grossi said. Israel is believed to have dozens of nuclear weapons, though it has never formally acknowledged their existence, and is not a signatory to the NPT.


The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Footage shows aftermath of Israeli strike on Gaza school turned shelter
At least 17 people were killed in an Israeli strike on the Mustafa Hafez school, which shelters displaced Palestinians in Gaza City, and 20 others were wounded, according to health officials at al-Shifa hospital. Witnesses said women and children were among those killed who had been sheltering at the site. It came as Hamas said it was studying what Donald Trump called a 'final' ceasefire proposal for Gaza


Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
This Gaza film is impossible to review because I don't know who to believe anymore
Gaza: Doctors Under Attack (Channel 4) is the documentary commissioned but then dropped by the BBC – a rare example of the corporation smelling potential disaster. It aired last night on Channel 4 instead. Hardly anyone cares about Channel 4, so its impact will now be minimal. But the impact of the BBC's handling of this, and of their Gaza documentary that went before it – Gaza: How To Survive A War Zone, in which the child narrator was later revealed to be the son of a Hamas minister – will endure. It makes this film almost impossible to review, because you now wonder if you should trust what you are being told. Undeniably, the film is harrowing and shocking. It contains unbearably distressing scenes of children's suffering: a boy sobbing over the body of his father, a little girl on an operating table after the skin had been flayed from her torso. Gaza is hell on earth, and the documentary showed us this in graphic terms. You can see these images on television news reports, but they are brief. An hour of them is hard to endure. It is the central claims of the film that the BBC found too difficult to handle. They are a) that Israel is detaining, torturing and, in some cases, deliberately killing Israeli doctors and hospital workers, targeting them at work and at home; and b) that Israel is systematically crippling Gaza's hospitals as part of an overall plan to destroy Gaza. There is a playbook, the film says: attack the hospital and its surroundings with air strikes, besiege the building with ground troops and block medical supplies, detain medical staff, then withdraw troops and leave behind a non-functioning shell of a building. Move on to the next hospital and repeat. The documentary builds a pretty convincing picture of this. Doctors spoke of torture and imprisonment, while mobile phone footage captured chilling scenes, including Israeli soldiers allegedly raping a prisoner inside the notorious Sde Teiman prison (nine soldiers were arrested last year). An Amnesty International worker told of Israeli 'black sites' where men are detained without judicial oversight, alongside disturbing images of prisoners; she also declared that Israel was acting 'with genocidal intent' against the Palestinian healthcare system. Israel, according to the film's many disclaimers, denies all of the allegations made. The programme was hampered, as is all coverage of Gaza, by Israel's refusal to let foreign journalists in. It claims to be a 'forensic investigation,' but in the circumstances, that just isn't possible. An Israeli whistleblower, his face hidden, claimed to have worked as a doctor at a field hospital and to have witnessed a detainee being treated without anaesthetic as 'retribution' for October 7. This is grim. You think: was this a one-off or widespread? The Israeli government maintains that Hamas uses hospitals as part of its military strategy, and that some medical staff have treated Israeli hostages. Reporter Ramita Navai tells us that two of the doctors whose stories were featured here had expressed support for the October 7 attacks, although she omits to share the words. She asks one doctor if he ever treated hostages, and he insists that he didn't but equivocates on the wider point, saying 'even if doctors in other hospitals… dealt with the hostages and treated them, does that mean for saving the life of a hostage or treating one you should be killed or interrogated?' But some things are not in doubt. Doctors in Gaza are working under horrendous conditions, often without electricity, water and basic supplies, trying to save lives. Children in Gaza are living in unimaginable misery. On that, at least, the evidence is clear.