As Iran anticipates possible retaliatory attacks by Israel, its senior officials have threatened to strike by force and the armed forces have been put on high alert. But in interviews and social media and virtual town hall discussions, many Iranians said anxiety about an unpredictable war with Israel is spreading.
In telephone interviews with a dozen Iranians in different cities, men and women across political divides said they neither wanted nor supported war with Israel or the United States. They said their lives were already a struggle because of a terrible economy, US sanctions, corruption and repression. War could exacerbate these hardships and throw the country into further confusion.
“No one I know is preparing for a possible war,” Mahdiyeh, 41, an engineer in Tehran, said in a telephone interview. “We are worried. Let our normal life be. We neither want nor want to enter an age of war. She asked that her last name not be released for fear of retribution. She said she and her husband had prepared an emergency bag with their documents in case they needed to leave Tehran.
A message widely shared on social media by many Iranians was, “No war” and “Which bunkers will you use to protect the people? How do you repair damaged infrastructure? There is no point in war, let alone wreak havoc on Iran.
Iran fired 180 ballistic missiles at Israel on Monday in retaliation for Israel’s killing of its top regional ally Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, a senior Iranian general in Beirut and Hamas’s political chief in Tehran. Israel says it plans to retaliate by attacking Iran; Its potential targets include military bases for the Revolutionary Guards and oil refineries.
Iran’s President Massoud Bejeshkian traveled to Qatar on Wednesday to attend a conference of the Organization of Islamic Nations, where he said Iran was not seeking war, adding: “There are no winners in war, we know this.” He then warned that “even if Israel makes a small mistake, Iran will retaliate severely.”
Iran’s mission to the United Nations said in a statement that Tehran and Washington exchanged messages through their official intermediary in Tehran after the attack on Israel. The statement said Iran considered any country that aided Israel in an attack on Iran to be “complicit and a legitimate target”.
According to two Iranian officials familiar with the war planning and not authorized to speak publicly, Iran asked Russia to cooperate with satellite intelligence ahead of the Israeli strike.
But despite the official saber-rattling, even some of the government’s supporters who have cheered attacks on Israel face the realities of an all-out war that would destroy infrastructure and harm the economy. Faced with that prospect, some said they hoped Israel’s response would be limited and that any tit-for-tat strikes would end quickly.
“We had to nail it [Israel] face, otherwise it will move forward,” Hamidresa Jalepur, a prominent sociologist close to the reformist faction, said in a discussion on the clubhouse application. “If there is a war, it will be imposed on us.”
Mr. Jalepur said.
But discontent against the government runs deep, and in waves of protest, notably a women-led uprising in 2022, demonstrators called for the overthrow of the ruling clergy. The loyalty and ideological fervor of the revolution’s early years — when even young men volunteered for the front lines of the country’s eight-year war on Iraq — has given way to disillusionment and despair in the current state.
Some opponents of the government said they were angry that Iran had attacked Israel first, putting the lives and safety of its own citizens at risk for a cause outside its own borders. At anti-government protests in previous years, people chanted, “No to Gaza, no to Lebanon, my life to Iran.”
Now that Israeli attacks seemed possible and imminent, the government announced no emergency measures to prepare the population for war.
“Most of us are not happy about the intervention in the region of the Islamic Republic and its so-called proxies. People don’t want their national resources to be spent abroad,” said Mahan, 50, in the northern city of Rasht. “These days the most pressing feeling for me and most of my friends and acquaintances is the fear and anxiety of war.”
