Fireworks Wednesday
Hamid Alizad

Translation from Persian by Salar Abdoh

“No paradise can make up for this hell they’ve created,” the taxi driver said. A man in his fifties, his face was creased and tired from sleepless nights shuttling people who were trying to escape from or return to Tehran, out of real or imaginary fears. The drive itself was like a video game. Avoid this checkpoint or that military site; stop, look left and right, breathe and hit the pedal hard; because any minute they might hit you from the sky.

It was the 17th day of the war. I was on my way to the Eastern Bus Terminal to catch a ride back up north to the other side of the Alborz mountains, where I’d left my mother with some family friends.

Last summer, during the 12-Day War, my mother and I had fled north along the same route. I wondered if this would become something of a ritual – Israel begins a war, I pick up my mother from her place and we flee north. Israel stops the war, we come back. I wondered if Americans felt the same – Israel starts a war, US refuelling planes ascend into the sky and their aircraft carriers turn around to pay us another visit.

The difference is in cost, I guess. Ours is the price of a cab a few hours north to the Caspian Sea; I don’t know how many dollars are sunk into a several-thousand-mile aircraft carrier ride. In a way, I figure, we are all tied up in this together – me, my mother and the thousands of American servicemen and women on those ships.

Soon after our escape north, I learned of an emergency at my apartment. Nowadays you can’t do without a water pump in Tehran, especially if you live on the fourth floor, like I do. Water is already scarce, and the pressure is low. For it to get up to any floor past second, you need that pump. And mine, I found out on the 15th day of the war, was leaking onto the ceiling of my downstairs neighbour, who had returned to Tehran for a brief, fearful visit just to get his broken mobile phone fixed. My first thought was of my cat.

During war there are those who leave and those who stay. A friend who stayed had been going in to my house every day to feed the cat. When I called him, he said that he knew all about it. Parts of the apartment were flooded, he reported, but the cat was fine. It turned out that he now had to leave the area, before the next wave of bombing began. So I made another set of calls, until I found another friend who needed to get out of his own street as soon as possible because of an unexploded bomb. He agreed to pick up my apartment keys and wait there until a plumber arrived.

“I have a whole bunch of places to go to before yours,” my regular plumber said. “They all have this same issue. It’s from the blast wave.”

“The blast wave?”

“Yes, the blast wave. It’s ruining the pumps, I think.”

As soon as I hung up, the downstairs neighbour called to say that he had managed to stop the leak for now. So I called the plumber again and told him not to come.

“Thank you,” he said.

This struck me as a strange response, until he let me know he was being held at a checkpoint. It would have been some time before he got to my house anyway.

I thought: someone is going to get killed in these airstrikes because of my damned water pump. Those checkpoints have become targets. I had to do this myself. I had to get back to Tehran and fix the issue once and for all.

The next morning, the bus was only a third full, and the road was empty. I saw burnt buildings and twisted metal skeletons along a route I had travelled many times. For the whole journey the bus driver remained cheerful, calmly answering the passengers’ questions about Tehran – where they should go first and second and third in case of tragedy.

Near the Eastern Terminal, smoke rose from two industrial warehouses. You could tell that it hadn’t been long since they’d been hit. A few hundred metres from our destination, the driver stopped. He wasn’t going to drive right into the lot in case it was a target. Above us, we could hear the roar of jet fighters and then six distinct explosions somewhere. We heard them, but couldn’t see them.

There were three conscripts on the bus. They’d been recalled from leave for mandatory emergency service, and seemed especially nervous. Before getting off, one of them turned to another and said: “You shouldn’t have brought a bag with you. Now they won’t let you go back home. They’ll figure you’ve got everything you need in that bag.”

“Bag or no bag, they’re not going to let us leave. This time it’s for real.”

I felt for them, recalling my own hapless draftee days from another lifetime.

The man ahead of me seemed in a particular hurry to get off the bus. I tapped him on the shoulder. “Do they attack when it rains too?” I joked.

“Yes, I’m sure those pilots get very excited in the rain,” he replied seriously.

I took the metro so I could get home as soon as possible. I hadn’t expected it to be so full. Exhausted people were crawling out of their lairs, maybe to get something to eat outside, or just to see other faces. My own dread followed me. At my stop, I saw that tents – where supporters of the regime congregate in the evening – were pitched haphazardly, and defiant posters of war covered every wall.

Special police were stopping random cars and searching them. A soldier gazed into the sky behind his Dushka on the back of an armoured vehicle. Avoiding a glance at the destroyed police station on the south end of the square, I hurried towards home. Several owners milled about in front of their shops chatting and laughing and sometimes gazing at the sky like lost prisoners.

The door to my apartment was ajar, and the smell of wet wool filled the hallway. When I stepped inside, water squished from beneath the floorboards. The downstairs neighbour had been mistaken – water was still dripping from the hose. Someone had kindly folded away my rug, but it was now wet and sooty from the oil depot explosion, and smelled like something dead. I hung it on the clothes rack, looked for the terrified cat, filled its bowls with food and water and turned the stove on high, hoping to dry out the house. Then I went to look for the nearest plumber.

In the north, as everywhere in Iran today, it’s the ancient Persian Festival of Fire, which we celebrate on the eve of the last Wednesday before the new year, Nowruz. The family friends we are staying with own a factory, next to which they built another residence solely for such festive occasions. The entrance to the factory itself is striking. They have installed monumental paintings of Khomeini and Khamenei – so big that you feel cowed by them, as if you were trespassing or doing something sinful by just being here. It’s only now, away from Tehran, that I realise how scared I’ve been during the past 48 hours, how anxious I was to get back up here.

My mother sits in the living room of the guest house watching satellite TV with a few other women. The eldest son of the factory owner invites me for a drink back at his father’s office. It’s the first time I’ve been inside this space – a grand, luxurious room with brand spanking new leather furniture and another half-dozen pictures of the late Supreme Leaders lining the walls. I also notice a portrait of the factory owner, glass of wine in hand, wearing a suit and tie. I don’t comment on the incongruity.

Before long, the eldest son is fanning a charcoal grill in the yard. At 44, he already has a 17-year-old daughter and is an upper-echelon manager at one of the state-owned banks. His other brothers and sisters, who help manage the family businesses, also have government jobs of some kind.

During the 12-Day War, the eldest son and I had disagreed about Reza Pahlavi, whom I was critical of, and whom he supported, despite all those pictures of the Supreme Leaders at the factory. As we were arguing, his daughter had cut in: “Baba, why do you keep defending Pahlavi, a guy who hasn’t worked a day in his life?”

“Because things were better when his father was king. And besides, his family is from our province.”

Really?, I had thought initially. Supporting a monarch just because they happen to be from your province? But after a little more reflection I realised, yes, of course, people do that all the time.

The coals in the grill are red-hot now. The eldest son begins serving heaped plates of kebabs. You could almost imagine there was no war, and that my mother and I had not become internal refugees. Handing me my plate, the eldest son observes: “You know, all of us here have never figured out if you are a leftist, or something even more sinister?” He laughs. “What’s your story, really? Maybe you’re just happy with your life the way it is, and that’s why you don’t want Pahlavi to come back.”

Not wanting to resume our squabble, I answer softly: “How can I be satisfied with anything when I don’t have a job? I’ve been posting my résumé online via this lousy internet connection for jobs that no longer exist.”

Soon the factory owner is holding forth at the massive dinner table. He is a tall man with a deep voice and piercing eyes. One can tell right away that he is used to being listened to and obeyed. He is in a jovial mood today, and decides to make references to the glut of Supreme Leader pictures at the factory.

“One of my employees told me: ‘Boss, as soon as the government changes, I will take down the old pictures and put up new ones of Pahlavi. You don’t have to worry about a thing.’”

Everyone is laughing. But the patriarch’s face suddenly darkens. “They wouldn’t let the Iranian economy connect to the world,” he says. “This war is about connecting us to the world.”

No one from his own family is going to challenge him, least of all the eldest son. So I decide to give it a try. “Who was it who wouldn’t let the Iranian economy connect to the world?” I ask. “Did we not have a nuclear deal, until the Americans told the world we didn’t?”

He disregards my question, adding: “The Americans will hit this government so hard that eventually someone inside this regime will come out and say: ‘That’s enough. We give up. We’re ready to make a deal.’” Refilling his glass, he continues: “If they told the supporters and the opponents of this regime to take to the streets to see whose numbers are bigger, I can tell you the opponents would far outnumber the supporters. This regime didn’t listen to its own population. But this time around, things are different.”

No, I’m neither a leftist nor a Pahlavi supporter, and certainly not a regime crony. I rather like this gentleman, and am grateful to him for hosting my mother and me at this time. But I cannot hold back, even if that might jeopardise future invitations.

“If you’ll allow me,” I say, raising my glass as if to toast. “Let’s talk about all the people who put their hands in the regime’s hands all these years for profit’s sake. If the regime were to tell them, ‘Stay home. Don’t come out’, then how many people in total do you think would take to the streets?”

The factory owner gives me a look as if I were a fly he does not even deign to swat away. In the guest hall, one or two Supreme Leaders stare back at us.

The patriarch tells his eldest son to bring more kebabs.

Hamid Alizad is a pseudonym.

An Elephant Stamping a Fly
Ala’a Shehabi

​“War should be between equals,” the Saudi author Abdelrahman Munif wrote in his novel Cities of Salt. “A war between equal rivals is the only kind that does honour to the antagonists, even the loser. In an unequal war, even the winner loses.”

Israel’s Iron Dome – reputed to be one of the world’s most technologically advanced air defence systems – promised to make war unequal. Set up in 2011, the system intercepted the Palestinian resistance’s homemade rockets with near-perfect efficiency for over a decade. Along with the IDF’s global assassination programme, it stood as the emblem of Israeli invincibility.

The Gulf states have long wanted to invest in Israel’s defence and surveillance technology, but Tel Aviv largely refused to sell to them. That changed with the 2020 Abraham Accords, which were essentially a security agreement between the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Israel, with the question of Palestine relegated to a footnote. As Tariq Dana, a Palestinian scholar based in Doha, has observed: “Normalisation cracked open Arab arms markets that were historically sealed off to Israel, transforming the region into a lucrative export frontier for Tel Aviv’s military-industrial complex.”

The UAE has since done brisk business with Israeli firms. It signed a secret arms deal worth $2.3 billion with Elbit Systems (during the Gaza genocide); established a local subsidiary of Controp, manufacturing electro-optical surveillance; and purchased the SPYDER air defence system from Rafael. It has also set up a joint intelligence platform with the Israeli government, and participated in military exercises with the Israeli Air Force in Greece. In short, it has tried to purchase Israel’s particular vision of absolute security, one predicated on unquestioned technological superiority.​ That dream came crashing down on 28 February.

​Iran’s Shahed drone has proved to be a remarkably effective weapon in asymmetric warfare. Like a mosquito – sometimes lone, sometimes in a swarm – it evades interceptors, finds gaps in air defences and strikes with surgical precision. The Islamic Republic has used these “flying lawnmowers” to disable radars and collapse early-warning systems across the Jordan and the Gulf. Israelis sometimes now receive government alerts to enter shelters less than five minutes before sirens start sounding.

The analyst Esfandyar Batmanghelidj has estimated that a single Shahed drone can cost as little as $7,000 to build; Iran is believed to possess tens of thousands of them. To counter the flying lawnmowers, the Gulf states have fired American-made Patriot missiles ($4 million each) and fighter jets ($25,000 per hour). At the time of writing, the “80th wave” of Iranian attacks is underway. The Islamic Republic has fired nearly 5,000 drones and missiles at American military bases in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. According to The New York Times, many of the 13 US military bases in the region are all but uninhabitable, and thousands of American troops have been forced to disperse to hotel and civilian sites (and local residents are worried about being turned into human shields).

Critical radar and communication apparatus including THAAD missile defence systems have been destroyed, racking up damage worth $800 million, if not more. Oil and gas companies are invoking ‘force majeure’ clauses on the basis that the war is making it impossible for them to fulfil their contracts: refineries, storage tanks and ports have been crippled or rendered unable to ship. Deploying its Khorramshahr ballistic missile, Iran is now penetrating deeper into Israeli territory, reaching the desert towns of Arad and Dimona, near to a nuclear research facility. If Israel has used Palestine as a laboratory to market its “Tested in Gaza” weapons, Iran is now showcasing its own military technology directly on Israel, with its top-tier missiles likely being conserved for later use.

Abandoned by Trump, who started a war without warning or coordination, the Gulf states expected, but were completely unprepared for Iran’s attacks. When confronted about endangering US allies, the president said it was no “big deal”. The Carter Doctrine had promised to insulate the Gulf states from regional conflict by giving them access to technological supremacy, through any number of security arrangements and arms deals. But aligning with the US has proved to be the ultimate vulnerability.

The Gulf should have been ready. Iran had long warned that it would retaliate against a US attack by striking regional American bases. Over the past three years, US-allied military representatives – from Qatar, Israel, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE – had held secret meetings to plan and coordinate a response to the “Iranian threat”. They have had some success. In April 2024, their integrated air defence helped thwart Iranian missiles that were headed towards Israel, as a senior Bahraini defence official boasted to the Aspen Institute. During the12-Day War, Iran’s retaliatory strike on the Al-Udeid air bases in Qatar were likewise intercepted. The drones and missiles could reach both Israel and the Gulf.

That security guarantee no longer holds. By manufacturing Shaheds at scale, and combining it with an attritional strategy, Iran has changed the terms of air superiority. Its far wealthier adversaries have been exposed, like an elephant stamping a fly. The regional war that now risks spreading across the Middle East will not share the enormous asymmetries that marked Israel’s aerial assault on Gaza, in which IDF drones, F-35s and F-16s pounded a largely undefended civilian population.

The Gulf states now have a decision to make. They can either double down on their alliance with the US and Israel and recommit to the pipedream of techno-supremacy by rebuilding the infrastructure of war: shared radar systems, joint command centres and intertwined defence contracts. Or they can seek a diplomatic agreement with the Islamic Republic and pursue a resolution to the Palestinian question.

The Shaheds have exposed the folly of the first path, as have Israel’s own actions. Last September, as Hamas representatives were in Doha for ceasefire negotiations, Israel struck the residential governmental complex where they were staying, killing six people, including one Qatari serviceman, but missing the intended targets. US Air Force Lieutenant General Derek France later explained to reporters that Qatar’s air defences failed to detect and intercept the missiles because they “are typically focused on Iran and other [areas] where we expect an attack to come from”.

Ala’a Shehabi is a Bahraini academic and writer. She was Associate Professor of Middle East Politics at University College London.

Lebanon in a Whirlwind
Justin Salhani

Last Saturday, I drove to the Camille Chamoun Sports City Stadium complex, on the southern outskirts of Beirut, not far from where Israeli bombs have wrought vast destruction. The stadium, built in 1957, seats just under 50,000 people for football matches, though it also serves other purposes. Last year, it hosted the funeral of Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah; now it has been converted into a shelter to host a small fraction of the more than 1.2 million people – almost a quarter of the national population – displaced by the latest IDF aggression.

An army soldier waved me past a checkpoint and an official from the Ministry of Health greeted me inside the complex grounds. He pointed to an arcade that forms an opening in the stadium’s concrete exterior. It’s a reasonable design feature for a stadium, but a serious flaw for a shelter. The tents are set up underneath the stands, which act as a roof. Overnight, heavy rains washed in through the arcade and flooded many of the encampments.

When I passed through a gate at the far side of the stadium, a tent city came into view. White rectangular tarps the size of minivans line both walls of the enclosed entry area, creating a series of cramped alleyways that can only be traversed one person at a time.

The residents of the camp were mainly from southern Lebanon and nearby suburbs. Many were working-class folk who could not afford to stay in hotels or rent apartments. Some slept on the streets before being directed here. “Our hope is becoming weak,” Khodor Salameh, a 60-year-old from the south, told me. He was seated on a chair because the left side of his body is paralysed and his foot is swollen, possibly infected. “Every few years there’s another war.”

In the early hours of 2 March, not long after Hezbollah had fired a few rockets into Israel, loud explosions echoed through Beirut and across other parts of Lebanon. Tel Aviv saw an opening and took it, launching a full-scale attack on the capital’s southern suburbs, an area it had pummelled nightly for 66 days during the last intensification of conflict in 2024. A ceasefire was agreed that November, but Israel has consistently violated it – over 10,000 times, according to UN peacekeepers – by destroying equipment needed to reconstruct infrastructure and homes, demolishing villages along the border and killing civilians.

The ferocity of Israel’s aggression has been even worse this time. In just over three weeks, it has killed more than 1,000 people and ordered mass evacuations for large swathes of the country. It has declared its intent to occupy the entirety of the south and flatten the remaining border villages. It has dropped leaflets over Beirut warning residents that the “success of Gaza” would be coming to them. Israeli officials also have warned that the southern suburbs will soon “look like Khan Younis”, and that homes in frontline villages would be demolished, as per “the model we applied in Gaza’s Rafah and Beit Hanoun”.

Many in Lebanon have now been displaced for the second time in two years. This is perhaps the most intense weapon in Israel’s arsenal of psychological terrorism, which also includes sonic booms and the incessant humming of drones. The increased strain on people was evident at the stadium. I was speaking with a family when a veiled woman in her forties interrupted us. “If the war carries on for 10 years, we are steadfast,” she said. She smiled widely, but there was accusatory malice in her voice. “The most important thing is dignity.”

The woman, who had strikingly strong cheek bones, told me she has two homes, one in the south and one in Beirut’s southern suburbs. The Israeli military had given direct evacuation orders – these are still being delivered on X by its former Arabic-language spokesman, who has a large social media following – in both areas. Now, she sleeps on a wooden slab in a flooded tent. No one would rent her an apartment.

Hezbollah’s decision to re-enter the war has exacerbated deep faultlines in Lebanon. Some people still steadfastly support the group. On the first day of the conflict, at a school-turned-shelter in Ras Beirut, I spoke to Nader Akil, who had also fled his home in the southern suburbs for the second time in under a year. “We are with the resistance,” he told me. “And our children are with the resistance, and our children’s children are with the resistance.”

Not everybody feels that way. “If they had responded after children were killed, 3a rasse,” one friend with family from the south told me, deploying a phrase that translates loosely as ‘at your service’. But firing rockets in retaliation for Khamenei’s assassination filled her with rage

Israel thrives on such polarisation. Its attacks have mainly displaced Shia Muslims, the community from which Hezbollah derives the vast majority of its support. But they have been forced to seek refuge in areas predominantly inhabited by other communities. (Lebanon is home to 18 different sects, mostly groups of Christians and Muslims, and areas tend to be relatively homogenous.) Some towns, like Rmeish in south Lebanon, expelled displaced people after Israeli threatened to attack anyone communicating with Hezbollah. In others, like Bikfaya or Dekweneh, you have to acquire permission from the local municipality before hosting displaced people. One friend told me that his building, in Hamra – a mixed area of Beirut hosting many displaced people – banned visitors and even deliveries late at night. Hosting displaced people may well provoke Israeli attacks, as has happened on multiple occasions in the past. But it is hard not to read the bans and expulsions as a form of discrimination against Shias, who are collectively seen as Hezbollah partisans.

A corresponding sense of injustice was palpable at the stadium. “Israel is against us, America is against us, the Lebanese government is against us, and the Christians are against us,” the veiled woman, a Shia, told me. “But we will be victorious,” she went on, the smile never leaving her face. She stressed that she would blow herself up if she had to; her two children would grow up and go south to fight with the resistance. I took her forced determination as an effort to retain her dignity. But her message still left me uneasy.

Still, amid all this darkness, there are also gestures of unity. Restaurants have turned into food kitchens, doctors and pharmacists have been fundraising to provide medical care, and some people have opened their homes to the displaced.

Tel Aviv always had the strongest military in the region, but now it wants to become the unquestioned regional hegemon, expanding its control over Gaza, the West Bank and parts of Syria and Lebanon as well. It doesn’t just control the land, but also the sea along the Palestinian coast, and the skies over the entire region.

In the face of mounting aggression, the Lebanese government has tried to negotiate a ceasefire, but Israel isn’t interested. It wants its buffer zone. Increasingly, I get the sense that it wants to foster clashes inside Lebanon, to push the country and its people over the edge into violence. That way, it would not have to directly confront Hezbollah again, because the group will be too busy with internal problems. In any case, whenever Israel senses a threat, it can snuff it out with a quick drone strike or aerial attack.

In all, since 8 October 2023, Israel has killed more than 5,000 people in Lebanon. But, high on its military victories and operating with total impunity, it may well have underestimated the Lebanese people’s capacity for resistance. In the corner of the stadium, I spoke to a group of men who were drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Ali Saleh, a stocky 55-year-old with a grey buzz-cut, told me that when the bombing started, he fled his village in southern Lebanon with his son and his wife, who is sick with stomach cancer. It took them 26 hours to reach Beirut. Then he asked me to write down his phone number. “When we make it home, we expect you to come and visit us.”

Justin Salhani is a journalist and writer based in Ras Beirut.