Monstrous intimacy: The 12-Day War and Civil Society in Iran

Airstrikes on Tehran on Day 11 of the 12-Day war. Copyright: Social Medial

Israel waged on the people of Iran for 12 Days. Their sky was raided by drones and warplanes, and their homes were turned into columns of smoke. On the first hours of Day 1, residential neighbourhoods of Tehran from north to south and east to west were targeted. At Patrice Lumumba Street in Central Tehran, the remains of a mother and daughter were recovered. They were found hugging, the bottom half of their bodies ripped by the pressure of the explosion. Seventy-eight were killed and 329 injured in Tehran on this night alone. Iranian media outlets Shargh and Hammihan reported on the survivors and the victims^[1]. An aid worker who was dispatched to Narmak, east of Tehran explained:

The building had turned into a flattened earth in between its neighbouring buildings. It was as if there had never been a building and/or anyone living inside it. The bereaved families of the residents had got themselves to the scene. I was watching them. Some were crying and some were in shock, staring at the ruins.

On the evening of Day 1, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a direct message to the “proud people of Iran”, urging them to stand up against their government and embrace freedom: “We are in the midst of one of the greatest military operations in history, Operation Rising Lion… This is your opportunity to stand up and let your voices be heard: Woman, Life, Freedom.” The slogan of Iran’s 2022 uprising twisted on his tongue in deceivingly well-pronounced Farsi, and with it came a monstrous intimacy — a closeness that felt unsettling, invasive, and violent.

In the aftermath of the state suppression of the 2022 uprising, the Iranian left and civil society was scarred and fractured. Part reactionary, part progressive, part nationalist and exclusionary, and part democratic, they struggled to form a unified stance. For example, participating in a protest against the genocide in Gaza at the gate of Tehran University, a historic anchor for cries against imperialism, turned into an ethical and ideological battleground. Condemning Israel aligned with the ideological ground of the Iranian state and hence the participants were accused of legitimising the regime, even though they took part without hijab and held placards with leftist statements. The desire to stand with Gaza was embroiled in deep antagonism. It was in this context that Netanyahu’s emotionally charged appeal for intimacy served not as gestures of solidarity, but as a means to mobilise the civil society toward internal division, a civil war.

That same evening, Day 1, Reza Pahlavi, the exiled crown prince, released a statement that framed the Israeli aggression as an act of solidarity and, taking a step further, made an open call for a coup d’etat: “I have told the military, police, and security forces: break from the regime. Honor the oath of any honorable serviceman. Join the people.” The Reza Pahlavi of 2025 was markedly different from his younger self. Once trained as a jet fighter pilot, and be it symbolically, he had publicly volunteered to join the military and defend Iran against foreign aggression during the war with Iraq. The new Pahlavi, informed by his new circle of young far-right advisors, was too eager to welcome the aggressors. With this statement, rose a royalist surge of  appreciation. Pahlavi’s own wife posted a picture showing “Hit them, Israel, Iranians are behind you”, graffitied on the walls of a residential neighbourhood.

There had always been something sickly ironic and oddly revealing about the royalists' obsession with graffiti — a language born from protest, anonymity, and the margins. A year earlier, during the genocide in Gaza, a reporter from the prominent royalist media outlet Iran International toured Gaza. Chaperoned by the Israeli military, he pulled out his pen, and wrote “Woman, life, freedom” on the ruins of a Palestinian home destroyed by Israeli bombs. How dare he, we thought.

More homes were targeted on Day 2 along with hospitals, factories, municipal buildings and military sites across the country. Israel claimed the extrajudicial killing of two dozen military figures but brought no mention of the death and injuries of hundreds of other civilian victims. On Day 3, it advised the residents of Tehran, a city denser than New York with a population of 10 million, to leave their homes, a mass exodus with no destination. In Shahrak Chamran, north east of the city, a fourteen-storey building was turned into dust, killing sixty civilians, including twenty children.

Nevertheless Shargh reported that the bereaved insisted on staying put. Mothers and sisters whose loved ones disappeared in the bombardment lingered on the steps of Kahrizak’s forensic medical unit while its windows shook from the pressure of an explosion nearby, insisting to learn if the remains of their loved ones had been pulled from the rubble and identified. Others, including many of our friends and family, cousins, uncles and aunties, also chose to dismiss the advice. It takes a lot to leave your home behind. On that evening the Shahran fuel depot north of Tehran was attacked. The fire ignited eleven fuel containers, one after another. It lasted throughout the night, blanketing the city in a thick black smoke.

Time in war is often measured by intensity rather than duration. For many, these three days disinterred and condensed eight years of memories from the war with Iraq. Some taped the windows of their home as their parents had done so back in the 1980s. Neighbours from lower floors offered their homes to be used as safe spots for others in their building. What differed from the 1980s was the soundscape. The sudden wails of alarms during the war with Iraq are ingrained in memories. While distressing, they brought people together in shelters, uniting them in fear and survival. This time, however, there were no sirens. The sky was left open for Israeli raids. On phone calls with our family, we could hear the sound of bombs, explosions, and interceptors—set against a silent backdrop, unannounced and haunting.

From Day 3, social groups and unions began to take positions in relation to the Israeli aggression. The Iranian Writers Association wrote: 

A people who have stood for years against the repression and crimes of the Islamic Republic, who have lost their finest children in street massacres, executions, prisons, and detention centers, and who have endured poverty, corruption, and systemic discrimination — are now feeling the bootprints of a foreign enemy on their throats as well.

Soon after, on Day 4, a group of  independent labour and grassroots activists, including the Syndicate of Workers of Tehran Bus Company, Syndicate of Workers of Haft Tappeh Sugarcane Agro-Industry, Retired Workers of Khuzestan and Pensioners' Union organised their statement against warmongering policies:

Iran’s working people — workers, teachers, nurses, retirees, and other wage earners — have never benefited, and will never benefit, from war, the expansion of militarism, the bombing of the country, or imperialist and exploitative policies. 

Three political prisoners from the women's ward of Evin prison wrote

We demand an immediate end to this devastating war and call on you, the conscious and courageous people, to raise your voices against the warmongering rulers and to demand peace, freedom, and justice.

Each position was anchored in a situated experience, and yet they all prioritised one understanding of the war: this war was imposed against the people of Iran, not with them.

Time was critical and the Iranian civil society was looking up to its cultural figures and internationally recognised voices like Nobel Peace Prize laureates Shirin Ebadi (2003) and Narges Mohammadi (2023) to use their influence and global platforms and call for international solidarity, demand an end to the war and advocate for peace. It was on Day 4 that Ms Ebadi and Mohammadi, issued their collective statement alongside five other cultural figures. Rather than a call for ceasefire, however, the signatories opened by urging the Islamic Republic to halt uranium enrichment. They avoided condemning Israel and instead drew a moral equivalence between the attacks on infrastructure and the mass killing of civilians in both Iran and Israel. Their words, while unexpected, were consistent with a particular language of human rights that defined the Iranian opposition in exile.

For the past two decades, a vast infrastructure of NGOs and media outlets coalesced, tasked with monitoring rights in Iran and backed by millions in foreign funding. Through their tireless work and the broader rise of liberal democracy, the concept of revolution as a political horizon gradually gave way to the notion of regime change (barandazi) and the figure of the revolutionary subject was supplanted by that of an abstract victim. With the arrival of the Trump administration, this infrastructure began to sputter. Far-right circles in Washington began to audit and reorganise the field toward U.S. strategic interests. It was in this context that Netanyahu and Trump gestured toward regime change and a phrase became a refrain: “This is not the people’s war.” 

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More bombs dropped from air and the fantasy of a “targeted” and “liberating” foreign intervention turned into the horrid reality of devastation but even the anti-war Iranians struggled to mobilise. Except for a few scattered gatherings—Berlin being the rare exception—no major anti-war demonstration emerged to oppose the Israeli assault. A new reality had begun to take shape, born in part from the liminal nature of the war.

War is a decisive event. Posed as a question, its nature and the appropriate political stance towards it, has long served as a tool to distinguish allies from enemies. Back in September 1980, during the first week of imposed war, marked by Iraqi airstrikes and ground invasions, the Iranian civil society and the left in particular faced a similar situation. At the time, the left carried an unprecedented diversity of political tendencies and theoretical positions regarding the 1979 revolution and the emerging Islamic Republic. But with the break of the war, this diversity was quickly thrown by a more urgent question: What is the nature of this war and with whom should the left align itself?

The two factions of the Organisation of Iranian People's Fedai (or Fedai in short,), took contrasting positions. The Majority faction (Aksariyat) denounced the Iraqi aggression as an imperialist war against the revolution in Iran and called on its forces to join the frontline. For them, the war brought the duty to maintain unity and defend the nation. They went as far as advocating to “arm the Revolutionary Guards with heavy weaponry”, the very paramilitary force previously deployed to suppress the autonomous councils in Kurdistan. In contrast, the Minority faction (Aghaliat) saw the war as a betrayal of the people's interests, reactionary and pan-Islamist.

Peykar, the Marxist splinter of People’s Mojahedin of Iran (MEK), accused both Fedai factions for justifying the position of the Iranian state as that of a defender responding to an act of aggression, and allegedly worked towards initiating a civil war.

In a similar way, the Organisation of Communist Unity (Vahdat-e Communisty), described the Majority faction as “renegades of the Second International”.  They insisted on joining the resistance against Iraq but considered both regimes, the Ba’athi and the Islamic Republic, as reactionary. For them, the leftist forces had to organise their defence through independent leftist ranks and avoid being absorbed into the structures of the Iranian regime under the guise of defending the homeland. The MEK itself, originally called on its forces to join the frontlines against Iraq, but in less than a year, changed tack and entered an armed conflict with the Iranian state. Within five years, the group relocated to Iraq and began launching its attacks from the aggressor's soil.

The writings and publications at the outbreak of the war offer a unique and revealing perspective. The non-Marxist leftist group, Movement of Militant Muslims, for example, who despite their religious background had refrained from taking part in the state apparatus, ran a headline in their newspaper declaring that this war had been imposed, that Iraq was allied with the United States, and that it enjoyed the support of imperialism.

Worker’s Way (Rah-e Kargar), known for their radical left stance, had been amongst the first to openly critique the Islamic Republic. In their pamphlet Fascism: Nightmare or Reality? for instance, they had famously declared that the Iranian Revolution had been defeated at the moment of its victory. Yet, in their special issue on the imposed war, they expressed a striking insight: 

A full scale war has been imposed on our homeland… Why do we consider this war an aggression by Iraq and the U.S.? Certainly not because the Iranian government is revolutionary, democratic, or popular. The opposite is true. Precisely because the war between Iraq and the Islamic government is more against our people than against the Islamic government. Because if, as a result of this war, the Islamic government is overthrown, Iran will also lose its political independence.

Forty-five years later, all these groups had either discontinued through suppression or pushed into exile.

Articulation of positions by the Iranian left on the Iraq-Iran war. From left to right: (1) Kar, Organisation of Iranian People's Fadaian (Majority), 24 Sep 1980, (2) Kar, Organisation of Iranian People’s Fadai Guerrillas (Minority), 23 Sep 1980, (3) Ommat, Movement of Militant Muslims, 23 Sep1980, (4) Peykar, Organisation of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, 23 Sep 1980.

In truth, there is no real comparison between the wars with Iraq of the 1980s and the war with Israel of 2025. While both aggressors received the imperialist support of the US, the Ba’thi regime was authoritarian, and Israel, a settler colonial state. Furthermore, the Israeli aggression of 2025 did not fit within any legal framework. A group of UN experts including Mai Sato and Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteurs on situation of human rights in Iran and Palestine respectively, stated:

[The Israeli] attacks represent a flagrant violation of fundamental principles of international law, a blatant act of aggression and a violation of jus cogens norms—peremptory rules of international law from which no derogation is permitted. 

Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter prohibited the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, including actions justified as preventive self-defence in response to alleged nuclear proliferation.

At 4:58pm of Day 4, the Israeli military posted an evacuation order for residents of Tehran. A large district in northern parts of the city with a population of 300,000 was marked in red. A message accompanied the map in Farsi : “emergency order to everyone present at district 3” and explained “your presence in this area is a threat to your life”.

The order made its way from phone to phone. Many were confused. In less than an hour, journalists at the state TV broadcast building, located inside the designated evacuation zone, were under attack. A reporter was reading a declaration of resistance live on air when the strike hit. Mid-sentence, with her finger raised for emphasis, the building shook. Grey dust engulfed the set, and she fell from her seat. Multiple strikes tore the building. A thick column of black smoke, kilometers long, rose from it and Tehran’s residents began filming it from all around. Unlike the attack on the fuel depot, the attack on the broadcast building was in bright daylight. In effect, the evacuation order had functioned as an act of staging: a visual boundary to draw attention to an arena, primed for the eruption of terror as a carefully orchestrated spectacle. The residents of Tehran were called to witness.

Shortly after the attack, a Shargh reporter was dispatched to the scene to document the aftermath. Around the same time the Iran Red Crescent Society (IRCS) sent its ambulances and aid workers to search for survivors. “They told us only those who weren’t afraid should go, because drones were circling above us, and we could see the missiles,” said an aid worker. Soon, one of the ambulances was attacked by missiles. The vehicle, its tires, paint, the fabric of its seats and the bodies inside were burnt from the heat of the explosion. The two aid workers driving it were announced as martyrs. Meanwhile, the Shargh reporter vanished upon arriving on the scene. The following day, it became clear that he had been arrested and taken for questioning by the Iranian security forces. Clearly it had been decided that such a scene was not suitable for either reporters or rescuers.

*

Day 4 of the war on Iran was Day 620 of the genocide in Gaza. Since 7 October 2023, social media platforms and flyers dropped by air have been used by the Israeli military to issue evacuation orders, embark on mass displacement of civilians, and spread terror in Gaza and Lebanon. A six-year-old Palestinian Hind Rajab and her family were killed following one of such evacuation orders last year on 29 January 2024. Forensic Architecture’s investigation showed the area they lived in was bombed heavily the day before, and they had chosen to flee a home in the Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood. An evacuation order was issued by the Israeli military at the same time asking residents to move south, but they could not have done so because of a blockage on the road from the debris of a recently bombed building. Their car was shot by hundreds of bullets. Hind and her cousin Layan hid between the bodies of their family members. Layan Hamada, Hind’s fifteen-year-old cousin, was killed while on a call with the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) and Hind continued to stay on the line. When the PRCS ambulance reached her, it was attacked and burnt from the heat of the explosion.

The logic behind Israeli evacuation orders in Gaza resonated with those in Iran. These orders reflect a strategy rooted in settler-colonialism, where populations are made to move or face destruction. Crucial to understanding the war on Iran is tracing the continuity in its forms of violence to the genocide in Gaza. The struggles against this war and this genocide were not isolated, but parts of the same frontier against occupation and imperialism.

*

On Day 5, the Internet connectivity was lost across the country due a cyber-attack.

On Day 6, the state TV was hacked, airing footage from the 2022 protests and urging people to take to the streets. Driven by fear of further cyber-attacks, the state brought a sharp drop in connectivity from 80% to 3%. War could no longer be televised. Its pictures were not to spread virally, and evacuation orders were not to reach civilians. The closure of internet connectivity brought a blackout that lasted for days. Attempting to cross through and call friends and family with landlines from overseas, we would hear another hack, an AI generated sound, inviting us to calm down and imagine a peaceful memory.

Day 7, Day 8 and Day 9 passed in blackout. Some argued that the drop in connectivity helped tame down the operations of Israeli drones and intelligence. Nevertheless, bombs dropped from the air unannounced. Lives were taken.

On Day 10, four days into the black out, US president Donald Trump posted a message on X:

We have completed our very successful attack on the three nuclear sites in Iran including Fordow, Natanz and Esfahan. All planes are now outside of Iran airspace. A full payload of BOMBS were dropped…”. He concluded in capital letters “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!

This was 3.23 am local time. Aimlessly searching the internet, we tried to get information about what has taken place, the side effects of exposure to radiation and means to minimise them. The phone lines to Iran were still blocked and our calls home went unanswered. This aggression was ontologically different to the 1991 Gulf War, the 2001 war on Afghanistan or the 2011 war in Syria. A new form of far-right alignment had crystallised with new language, new modes of operation and new theatrics. Undeclared wars were waged bypassing the UN charter entirely and without any form of accountability. Justifications for aggression, even if framed as pre-emptive, could now be offered retrospectively, after the damage was done.

*

At noon on Day 11, hell broke in Tehran. Israel dropped one hundred bombs across the city unannounced and within the span of a few hours. Columns of smoke, composed of dust, concrete, cloth, furniture and sometimes flesh rose from the city. Some narrow and some large, swallowing their surroundings. One strike cut the electricity for the northern neighbourhoods.

And then, came an attack on the Evin prison. The coordinating council of Iranian Teachers Union reported major damage to the visitation hall, the infirmary, the entrance to Ward 4, the high-security wards, 209, 240, 241, and Ward 2-A, and the women’s ward where parts of the walls and ceilings collapsed and windows shattered. The testimonies that made it through the hurried phone calls between the survivors with their families, videos and image documentations of the damage across the complex and satellite imagery all pointed to not one, but at least four deliberate attacks. Seventy-one were killed, including prison staff, conscripted soldiers, prisoners, and civilian visitors. Leila, a young woman who had attended Evin with her child to bail her husband out, was among the victims.

“Did you say Israel launched a symbolic attack on the prison as a repressive institution?” wrote Sarvenaz Ahmadi, an Iranian social worker and journalist who was sentenced to six years imprisonment after taking part in the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, and had been granted conditional release only a few months earlier. “You say they warned them to evacuate first? You say they struck to scare them into releasing the prisoners? Is this a movie to you?... Were they injecting uranium in the infirmary? Were they hiding military officials inside the library books in ward 13? Were they stockpiling missiles in the prison yard? The hell with you”.

The attack on Evin evoked the memory of the horrific finale in 1988 of the eight-year war, when in the time between Iran’s signing of the ceasefire agreement with Iraq and the weeks after its implementation the state massacred thousands in prisons across the country, including Evin. We searched for the statement of the three prisoners from the women's ward released just a few days ago, and read it over:

We, the political prisoners — held like government hostages behind iron walls, defenceless — remain, despite all restrictions and pressure, deeply concerned for the freedom-seeking, justice-demanding, and revolutionary people of our country.

In what world could the attack on Evin Prison not be considered a war crime? And yet, many adopted a posture of neutrality, claiming this is not our war, ironically echoing Israel’s own narrative. Some saw themselves as collateral victims of a war they had no part in and chose silence. Others argued that the state provoked the attack, a framing that as the prominent Iranian translator Nikou Sarkhosh observed, reflects a broader pattern of blaming the victim rather the aggressor, not unlike the logic often used in cases of sexual assault. Still some grappled with the difficult task of pursuing accountability while holding two truths at once: No to Israel. No to the Islamic Republic. What lacked was a political movement against the war, rooted in the right to self-determination and committed to a shared struggle with Palestine against imperialism. Such a movement would have recognised regime change through war as a form of occupation and thus, as its own defeat.

*

In the early hours of Day 12, while a neighbourhood in Tehran was issued an evacuation order, President Donald Trump made another post on X: “It has been fully agreed by and between Israel and Iran that there will be Complete and Total CEASEFIRE… THE 12 DAY WAR will be saluted by the World”. 

In the early hours of the morning, while everyone was asleep, two more evacuation orders were issued. Bombs dropped in all three neighbourhoods after the post. From a girls student dormitory in Seyyed Khandan, Hammihan reported, only one girl survived. Thrown into the street from the pressure of the explosion, with no shoes and in sleepwear, covered in blood, she had shouted “My friends… my friends… my friends burnt”. 

Filed under: article-author-omid-montazeri, article-author-Samaneh-Moafi