Debris of War
A field report from neighbourhoods attacked by Israel in Tehran, alongside interviews with friends of the victims
Elnaz Mohammadi and Sara Sabzi, Community department, Hammihan (Compatriot), 15 June 2025
In Patrice Lumumba Street, firefighters pulled eight people out of the rubble by 2 p.m. on Friday, leaving eight dead. It is now noon the day after the attack. The war has begun. Men, women and children stare with stunned, shocked eyes at the scene, phones in hand. They whisper the news as a mechanical loader moves up and down through the mass of dust. Instead of their neighbours and friends, there is only a large mound of dirt and iron. Demolition trucks slowly pick up the remaining pieces of the house and load them onto waiting trucks at the end of the street. This is the house of Ahmad Zolfaghari, a nuclear scientist who was targeted by an Israeli missile at 3 a.m. on 11 June. Twenty-three hours later, his body and that of his son had still not been found. Two firefighters report eight deaths in the attack while taking a short break away from the rubble-clearing site.
At 3:00 am on 14 June, Israel launched attacks on various locations in Tehran, Isfahan, Hamedan, Khorramabad, Borujerd, Tabriz, Piranshahr, Kermanshah, Ilam and Arak. In addition to military positions, it also targeted residential areas in the neighbourhoods of Qeytariyeh, Niavaran, Chitgar, Mahallati Township, Shahid Chamran Township, Kamraniyeh, Narmak, Saadatabad, Shahran, Patrice Lumumba Township, Shahid Deghayeghi Township and Garmdarreh. These houses were home to a number of IRGC commanders and six nuclear scientists, and many citizens also lost their lives alongside them. According to the Fars News Agency, 78 people were killed in the Israeli terrorist attacks in Tehran by the end of Friday. As of the time of writing, no new figures on the number of deaths had been released, but the Ministry of Health reported that 800 people had been injured.
The alley is blocked with yellow tape and the sound of loaders continues unabated. Both houses adjacent to the missile site were damaged, prompting their residents to evacuate. Tragically, the Parsa family lost their lives in the blast a few minutes after arriving home. Now, the 26-year-old's friends and acquaintances stare at the rubble of his house. 'He was with us until two in the morning last night. The blast took him, and then he died in hospital.' The last friend to see him tells this to 'Compatriot', a young man with worried, bloodshot eyes, who is too exhausted to say any more.
Residents of houses opposite the missile site have also come out, recounting the sound of the blast; none of their windows have glass. Residents of the neighbourhood heard the sound before 3:30 am, and those who lived closer felt the shockwave more intensely. In fact, if they had been standing close to the windows, they would have been pushed back. The explosion was so intense that it reached the cars parked in the alley, as if something had landed on their roofs.
A woman living near Abshuri stands behind yellow tape, watching the rubble being cleared away. The blast wave also reached her house. After a rocket hit Ahmad Zolfaqari's house, she went to the window to see where that terrible, endless sound was coming from. But the blast wave pushed her back. 'We didn't know where to go. If it was an earthquake, we would say we need to go somewhere strong, but where can you go for this? We don't know where they're going to strike from.' The other neighbours didn't know where to go after the attack either. A young man who lived a few houses above the site of the explosion didn't know whether to leave his house or stay.
He understood the attack as follows: bright light, the sound of an explosion, the sudden opening of doors and windows. "First there was a loud noise and we thought it was lightning. I went to my mother so she wouldn’t be scared, but the next missile came with a loud bang and a bright flash like a firework, hitting the building hard and shaking everything." It was as if a storm was raging everywhere. “I was confused and dazed for a moment. There was a lot of smoke, and everything smelt of burning. My eyes were burning. One or two hours later, when we came down, we found out who lived in this building.” The residents still don’t know the exact name of the person whose house was targeted. Coloured blankets have replaced the windows of houses in neighbouring streets and glass shards are scattered everywhere. Amidst the rubble, a shocked and bewildered woman looks at her damaged house.
She had just been informed and had arrived. The head of the local police station told the most severely affected residents to report to the police station and evacuate the destroyed houses, and to keep their doors locked. Due to the debris removal, electricity and gas have been cut off to the surrounding houses, and the residents of the two houses next to the missile site have completely evacuated. The residents of the attacked house ran out with their clothes and mobile phones when the explosion occurred, fear wrapped around their souls. They do not know if they can return to a house with a gap between its walls and those of the neighbouring house, full of dirt. Their friends and acquaintances have offered them help and shelter.
The young daughter of the family saw "something like fire" light up, but it was a missile: "They fired two missiles here. I saw the second one myself. It came with a light and hit the house." After the first missile, she ran inside to her father. 'Daddy, Israel fired,' she said, but he replied that someone's house must be on fire. The second blast wave sent glass flying over her father's head and injured him. 'We were the only ones who saw 14 bodies.' Behesht-e Zahra's (funeral) car is now parked a little lower down, and its occupants are waiting for the remaining missing bodies to be transported (Behesht-e Zahra is the cemetery of Tehran - note of the translator)
Hora is a woman who lives with her husband in a house on Patrice Lumumba Street. Their house is a short distance from the site of the missile attack on the home of a nuclear scientist. The northern wall of their house was destroyed, and the building was completely evacuated. 'I think it was around 3:30 in the morning, but I’m not really sure. We were asleep and woke up to the sound of an explosion, the ground shaking and thick gas in the air. The northern side of our house was destroyed, making it difficult to get out. I posted on X-net because I couldn’t contact anyone.” However, when she posted on X-net saying that their house had been destroyed, social media hadn't yet been flooded with images of war destruction. ‘That’s why I wrote, too. I didn't understand what had happened, and I just wanted to let people know that it had happened here.' Their house is a four-storey apartment block, and Hoora and her husband live on the third floor.
She tells 'Compatriot' about the destruction caused to their building by the blast wave from the missile: 'The north side of the house is the living room and kitchen, and the south side is the bedrooms. We were in the bedroom, and on the opposite side, the entire wall of the house had collapsed. At first, I thought our building had been completely destroyed. There was thick white gas and nothing could be seen at first. Then we saw that the other side of the house had been destroyed, as if all the furniture had been pushed across to our side. There is a corridor between the living room and the bedrooms; things were filling it up, and we thought we were trapped.”
They were forced to leave the house because it was uninhabitable. “The first and second floors were not as badly damaged as our unit. I didn’t see the fourth floor, so I don’t know about that. But our floor was more damaged than the first and second floors.” When Hoora and her husband went out into the street, they saw people coming out too. “I still don’t really understand what happened. Now that I think about it, I can’t remember much. It was a very scary scene. At first, I thought it was lightning or an earthquake because the building was shaking so much. Then, when we came down, our neighbours told us that the fire had started on that side. We looked up before we could get down and saw the fire.”
Some of their neighbours were injured in their building: One of them, who was sleeping in the living room, had his head cut by glass. When I saw him, he was generally OK, but he was huddled up because of the force of the explosion. Another neighbour's clothes were bloody too, but when I checked him over, he was unharmed."
They returned to their house at 10 a.m. to gather some supplies, but people around the house wouldn't let them in. According to Hoora, they were 'strange'. “When we returned, several people from the emergency room came and wouldn't let us in. Strange people were passing by our house and making strange comments. People with walkie-talkies, people on motorbikes, and even couriers. Several people said they were from the crisis management headquarters and asked what had happened. I showed them videos of the damage to the house and asked how severe it was. Hoora reports that the governor's office had contacted their neighbours to tell them not to worry about housing.
“Our entire building had been evacuated and the house next door was badly damaged and uninhabitable. But the explosion shattered the windows of the other houses in the alley. The blast wave was so strong that windows were shattered on both sides of the alley." According to him, there was only a yard north of their house and the place where the missile hit, but the houses next to the impact site were more badly damaged, and some of their residents were killed. “When we went to the house to collect our belongings, we saw that the house hit by the missile was gone. The house next to it had also been destroyed, and we heard that people had died there too.”
Parnia, Tara, Majid
Meanwhile, rescue vehicles are stationed on the side of Shahr-Ara Street, and the rubble-clearing operation in the Orchid Complex is ongoing. Shahr-Ara Street is closed off with yellow tape from Mohammadi Street onwards and only pedestrians are allowed to pass. Since morning, people have been standing in front of a building with one of its walls completely torn off, to see with their own eyes that a civilian residential building in western Tehran had been targeted by an Israeli missile. How many times have they repeated these sentences to themselves to make themselves believe it? Some say that, after last week's news, they were ready to wake up to the sound of an explosion one night. Due to the rubble-clearing operation, entry to the complex is prohibited, but the explosion was so intense that it tore off the wall of one of the floors of the opposite block, which can clearly be seen from the street.
The building that was hit by the missile was the home of Abdulhamid Minouchehr, the dean of the Nuclear Engineering Faculty at Shahid Beheshti University. It was a four-storey building in the Orkideh complex on Shahran Street. The top two floors collapsed onto the lower floors. Parnia Abbasi and her family lost their lives there. It is also the building where Tara Hajimiri's friends and her club coach were searching for any sign of her. They asked the man with the list of bodies found for Tara's name and eventually found it on the morgue list: Tara, daughter of Ibrahim. The girl's uncle had identified her body, but the bodies of her mother and father were still under the rubble at that time. All three members of the Hajimiri family were killed in the explosion.
Another woman was also searching for her missing relative in the rubble of the Orchid Complex: the sister of a man named Majid. The blast wave had thrown his pregnant wife onto a tree in front of the house, but she survived. At the same time, while she was sitting on the ground next to the Orchid Complex wall and the rubble was still being removed, she was informed that she had to go for a DNA test; perhaps one of the unidentified bodies was her brother. The loaders were still removing the rubble and people were still standing in front of the complex. The street was not empty.
There are no statistics
In the early hours of 13 June 2025, a few minutes after the explosions in western Tehran, the injured were taken to Rasoul Akram, Shariati and Imam Khomeini hospitals. Tehran’s emergency department had not announced any statistics on the number of injured or dead by the end of yesterday. The injured had glass in their eyes and bloody wounds from the blast wave and falling debris from walls and household items. The blast wave had even turned plates in houses into splinters. Yesterday, the Ministry of Health emphasised in its news that there was no shortage of medicine and equipment. Hossein Kermanpour, head of the ministry’s public relations centre, announced yesterday that hospitals across the country had so far provided services to more than 800 injured people, most of whom were women, children and civilians. More than 230 of those injured had been discharged.
As of the evening of 13 June, at least 30 patients were on the emergency admission list at Rasoul Akram Hospital and nearly 10 bodies had been transferred to the hospital morgue, around five of which were children. Among the injured at the hospital is a woman whose head was injured by falling glass and a wall after an attack on a border guard's house. She has now been discharged with a bandaged head, while her husband remains in hospital. Some of the injured were treated as outpatients in the early hours, while others were hospitalised. For hours after the attack, injured people were still arriving at the hospital to get their wounds stitched up, and by Friday evening, the crowd that had been at the hospital that morning had dispersed.
It was like a war movie
Leila and her 16-year-old daughter were awoken by the sound of an explosion at 3.20am on 14 June 2018 while they were in bed at the intersection of Alborz and East Zagros Streets on Marzdaran Street. Leila and her daughter, who had shared their home for 17 years, experienced a horror they had never imagined: the horror of war. Leila told Hammihan that, at that hour of the morning, she felt their house was collapsing on top of them, ending their lives. 'My daughter had woken up and was having a heart attack. At around 7 a.m., I saw a picture on social media that I thought might be of an explosion near our house. That’s when I first went outside.”
When Leila stepped onto the street, she saw scenes that seemed like a war movie to her, one that no one would want to be part of. “When I left the house, I saw that the fifth floor of the building opposite had been hit. Windows in buildings opposite our house were broken, as were the windows of cars parked on the street. The floor next to the attacked apartment was also damaged. I saw people removing broken glass from window frames. There were two ambulances, a fire engine and about ten sweepers, clearing the glass from the street.
The entire street was covered in broken glass, and the neighbours were shocked and worried.' According to him, the destroyed house belonged to the neighbours and the building guard of 'Leila' House, home to 'Amir Hossein Faqhi', a nuclear scientist. From Friday morning until today, successive explosions in different parts of Tehran have robbed the city's people of sleep and filled their hearts with anxiety. While western Tehran was under attack, the Shahid Chamran residential complex in Nobaniad Square was hit by a missile. From the outset, yellow ribbons and metal barriers made all the streets leading to the complex and Nobaniad Square inaccessible. Security forces are now standing all around the complex, not allowing anyone to enter. Residents of the complex can hardly enter, and the surrounding streets are full of anxious people who have come out to see what has happened.
'Roya' is the name of a woman who lives in Qaytariyeh. At 3:06 in the morning, she was awoken by the terrifying sound of an explosion and initially thought that a building was being demolished. She tells 'Compatriot' about her experience of the rocket barrage: 'My family lives in the city of Drood in the Lorestan province. It was five in the morning when my mother called to tell me that Israel had attacked.'
On the first night of the attack, she heard three loud explosions in quick succession. “We have nothing to lose, and our only concern is the economy.” The Sarvo Asatid building in Saadatabad was another site of the missile attack on Tehran on the first night. Residents of Saadatabad came to their windows and balconies after hearing the sound of the explosion.
Sepehr, a resident of Saadatabad, has an eight-year-old son. On the first night of the attack, he woke up to the loud sound of an explosion. This reminded her of last year's Israeli attack on military centres. She heard two explosions and told Hammihan about them. 'The two explosions were very close, and I was very worried about my child. They were so close that I was sure he was in the city. A few minutes later, she realised that something had happened in Saadatabad and Farahzad Book Square, which were very close to him. Once she had realised that war had broken out, he went to the balcony and saw a fighter jet passing overhead at a very low altitude. 'I don't know if it was friendly or enemy territory, but it seemed strange to me.' She is surprised that no defensive action was taken: 'Later, of course, he acted from a distance.'
Sepehr was five years old when Tehran was bombed in 1987, and she considers the trauma of war to be very significant for those born in the late 1950s and 1960s. “My most prominent childhood memories are related to the war. I remember the rocket barrages and the red sirens. That night reminds me of the rocket barrages in Tehran, especially in 1987. It is not pleasant to feel that the bitter experience of those years is being repeated for my child, becoming a trauma for him, and I don't want him to go through the same thing that I did."
Sepehr says that society's hope for an agreement between Iran and the United States left it psychologically unprepared to face such a war. 'A fatal psychological blow has been inflicted on society. War was not out of the question, but I did not think that we would be involved in a war so soon. The fear of losing life and the terrible events that could happen to anyone will have a profound psychological impact on us.' She also has many economic concerns: 'Unfortunately, our economy is tied to the psychological actions and reactions of society. We have not been able to plan for the long term in years. This is a fatal blow to the economy. It affects people's livelihoods and causes irreparable damage."
Sepehr complains about the lack of shelters, safe areas, and an adequate information system. “In the 1960s, sirens would sound before every attack and we would go to shelters. I question the fact that this is not happening now. Our country has not prepared the necessary infrastructure for war, but places like subways can function as shelters, and organisations like Passive Defence are responsible for these cases.” Sepehr says that war creates a sense of insecurity: “It creates a sense of personal and economic insecurity. I also feel insecure about the future. This war is unequal and will not achieve anything. Neither the enemy nor those seeking revenge will gain anything.”
Belvaz-e-Andarzgou was another place hit by missiles. A building near the Koh-e Noor complex was completely destroyed when a missile hit the top floor, leaving just four walls with no window frames and curtains blown out by the wind. It is uninhabited. Debris from the demolition has fallen on cars parked in the alley, and the scrap metal that was high-end cars just a few hours ago is being removed from the alley by crane.
Security forces have surrounded the building in an attempt to prevent people from gathering. A woman from Janatabad has come to watch, and another woman has been staying there overnight; now, she is sitting on the street watching the scene that has been playing on a loop in her mind since last night. Mehrdad’s house is a little further away from where the missile hit. At 3:32 a.m., she woke up to the sound of a loud explosion and searched X-Net for information about it: “I checked Twitter and found out about the attack. I had seen this building before, but it had no security, and I didn’t realise that someone important lived there.'
In response to Hamhihan's question about his vision for the future, she says, 'It's hard to talk about the future.' The Dot One building, which is owned by Babak Zanjani and located at the Jahan Koodak intersection, has also been hit by a missile. Yellow tape has been placed around the building, and security forces are standing on both sides of the intersection. Broken glass and metal window frames are scattered throughout Jahan Koodak. Cars drive cautiously over them and, with a quick glance at the tower hit by the missile, drive away.
Hassan is a caretaker of a building near Vanak. When he heard the explosion, he first thought it was an earthquake. However, when he went out into the street and heard the sound of rockets raining down, he realised that it was war. “The building was shaking and I ran out into the street in fear.” Abbas works in a nearby flower shop and spends his nights there until morning. He also heard the explosion and woke up. “We are worried, and innocent people are being killed. We're not politicians, so we don't know what these people are doing, but the economic situation is bad, and high prices have made people tired.”
Zahra always said that we are all human
Zahra Shams, whom her friends called Najmeh, is another civilian victim of Israel's attack on residential areas in Iran. Zahra, aged 35, enjoyed hiking and cycling. Now, one of her friends, Elham, tells Hammihan about her life and death: “I saw Najmeh almost every week. I got to know the kids who came to the carpentry club at the Andisheh Club. Najmeh was one of those who stood up to the restrictions imposed on women because of the hijab, even though she wore one herself. She was a very active woman, and I can still hear her laughter. We were even going to start a carpet weaving workshop together.'
Elham says that Zahra was very interested in nature and encouraged others: “She was a very flexible person and actively participated in group work.” According to Elham: “Najmeh was 35 years old and lived in Saadatabad. She would come to the gym with her friends on her bike. I don’t know if any of her other family members were injured or where her body is. She was a very kind and calm girl, and whenever a problem arose, she would say, “Don’t worry, Dad. We're all human.””
Blood on the pink mattress
In ten more days, Parnia Abbasi would have turned twenty-four. She was a poet, an English teacher and an employee of the Central Branch of the National Bank. She had graduated as a language translator from the International University of Qazvin, and had recently been accepted onto a Master's degree in Management. However, in order not to lose her job, she did not go to university to continue her studies. Maryam, Parnia's close friend, talks about her life in an interview with Hammihan. According to Maryam, the picture published by Fars News Agency this morning, in which a corner of a woman's hair is visible under the rubble on a pink mattress, is of Parnia Abbasi. Maryam says that Parnia's father was a retired educationist and her mother a retired Bank Melli employee. On Friday morning, Parnia was due to meet Maryam, her close friend, near her house at 11 a.m.
After the incident, Maryam went to their house and found it destroyed in Block 4 of the Orkideh residential complex on Shahran Street, near the gas station. Block 4 of the complex had 10 units, with floors 5 to 3 destroyed, and it seems that all of its residents have died. Maryam witnessed Parnia's body being pulled from the rubble of their house, followed by her brother. “They couldn't save her parents at the same time,” the rescue forces said. “Loaders need to come and remove the rubble so that their bodies can be pulled out.” Parham, Parnia's brother, was a student born in 2009."
According to Maryam, the middle of the building was hit, causing it to collapse. “Other people died in their building. That photo of the pink bed with blood on it is from that place.” Parnia once wrote a poem that was later published in the magazine Weight of the World:
“In a thousand places/I will end/burn/become a silent star/that in your sky/smokes.”