Between Two Wars
On Friday, June 13, 2025, what we never thought would happen finally happened.
It was around midnight in Tehran. I was in bed, casually checking the news for the last time before going to sleep. There wasn’t anything new or surprising, just headlines repeating the same news we had been reading for the past couple of days, or even weeks, about Iran–US talks, with the latest round held a couple of days earlier in Oman that had produced no results. The same old deadlock. I already had no hope in the negotiations, and the news just confirmed what I expected. I locked my phone, put it on the bedside table, and went to sleep.
It must have been around 3:00 a.m. Not long after I had fallen asleep, that I suddenly woke up to a very loud sound. It felt like some kind of giant aircraft had flown very close over our heads, and its movement shook the whole building so much that I first thought the windows had broken. My heart was beating fast, and not having processed what had happened yet, I rushed to my sister’s room to check on her and see if she had heard it too.
It had woken her up as well. She was lying in bed, stunned.
I asked her, “Did you hear it too?”
With that look of fear and shock in her eyes, she said, “Yes… was it a thunderstorm?”
I told her, “I don’t think so, it was way louder than a thunderstorm.”
We couldn’t think of anything else that could have caused such a loud sound. While still standing at the door, I asked her to check the news. It had probably been less than five minutes since we heard it. She grabbed her phone. Nothing had been said yet.
I went in and sat on the sofa in front of her bed, waiting to see if anything would appear. We sat there in silence for a while, trying to process the shock and come back to the moment. She kept refreshing — different outlets, social media, news channels — and then it finally became clear.
Israel had carried out a “preemptive strike” against Iran. I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. I was frozen.
I stayed in my sister’s room for a while. We were both stunned, trying to make sense of something that didn’t make sense yet. I had no idea what the right thing to do was at that moment. Eventually, I went back to sleep. All we could do was wait and see what the next morning would bring.
As the generation born after the Iran–Iraq war, this was our closest encounter with war. We had heard our parents talk about their experiences during those eight years. We had seen countless wars break out in the region since we were kids — in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon… War wasn’t a distant or strange concept to us, but we had never been this close to it.
The next morning, Saturday, June 14, 2025, we woke up to a completely new reality. It was still early, probably around 7:00 a.m., when my mom came into my room asking if I had heard the sound the night before. She wasn’t sure what it was. She thought she might have imagined it, or that it was a thunderstorm, or the sound of construction work. She had guessed everything but war. It seemed like she hadn’t checked the news yet.
I told her what had happened. Her whole face changed. She couldn’t believe it.
“Are you serious?” she asked, just to make sure she had heard correctly.
Standing at the door, still in shock, she said, “May God have mercy on us,” and went to turn on the TV.
Still in bed, I grabbed my phone to check the news. I had a WhatsApp message from a Lebanese friend in Dubai — someone who had already gone through a couple of wars with Israel — asking if I was okay.
That, in itself, was new for me.
I have many Arab friends, most of them Lebanese. In the past, it was always me checking in on them when there was a war in Lebanon. Now it felt like our roles had reversed. I was the “one” in a war — the one they were checking on to see if she was alive.
Sadly, living through war was something many people in the region were already familiar with. It was new to me, but I was starting to get a taste of it. Now I was in a real war zone, what I had always seen only on TV.
I replied to him and went through the news. More and more details about what had happened the night before were being circulated. So far, at least five top officials — including the IRGC commander and the armed forces chief — had been killed in the first wave of strikes, while broader estimates suggested around 15–20 senior military officials had been killed.
As I read the news, the very first thing I thought about was whether the Islamic Republic would respond to the attack. I was hoping that if they did, the scale of it would be something similar to what happened in October 2024, when Iran and Israel exchanged fire, yet it was very limited and contained.
But this time, the Israeli strike was vast, heavy, and had resulted in the killing of many key figures. It was very unlikely that the response would be limited. Not long after, probably around 9:00 a.m. Tehran time, the Islamic Republic carried out its initial response, launching drones toward Israel. And it quickly became more serious than I had hoped.
Saturday is the first working day of the week in Iran, but that Saturday was exceptionally a public holiday, and almost the whole country was shut down. Even though we didn’t have to go to work that day, the outbreak of war brought a lot of confusion and uncertainty about work and businesses. We had experienced something similar during Corona, but this was completely different.
Later in the day, my sisters and I received calls from our workplaces saying that due to the current circumstances, the office was closed, and we were asked to stay at home until further notice.
Toward the night, the number of attacks and the exchange of fire increased and it became clear that this was nothing like the October conflict. This was a serious war.
The following days were filled with fear and uncertainty — hearing explosions, warplanes, drones; checking in on friends and relatives; following the news; being disconnected from the outside world due to internet restrictions, but still trying to carry on however we could.
We were scared. At any moment, something bad could happen — to us, or to people we knew. But we were also grateful that we were safe so far.
As the situation intensified, some people started leaving Tehran for safer areas, mostly to the north of the country. But for us — and for many others like us — leaving wasn’t really an option. So, we stayed, hoping it would end soon.
After a couple of days, we somehow began to adapt. It wasn’t easy, but we found ways to deal with it and stay safe. We knew that the attacks usually got more intense at night, after the dark, so we had to be more alert. We taped the windows so that if they broke, they wouldn’t shatter. We moved into a more interior part of the house, with fewer windows and more distance from the outer walls. We tried to carry on with our routine in that limited space as much as possible.
My older sister seemed to be the most anxious. She couldn’t eat or sleep well, was constantly alert, and kept checking the news.
It was the early hours of June 17 — the fourth night since the war had started. We had all gone to sleep, trying to rest before the next round of explosions would wake us up. But before anything happened, my sister, who had stayed awake and couldn’t contain it anymore, woke us all up around 3:00 a.m., visibly shaken. “Trump has ordered people to evacuate Tehran” she said “We have to leave. Now.”
We tried to calm her down, telling her it was better to wait a bit, at least until morning, and then decide. We told her that leaving right then wasn’t even possible. We had nothing packed, nowhere to go, no plan. But she was so frightened that she couldn’t think of anything else but leaving.
While trying to figure out what to do, I kept thinking: how can an entire city, a city of around 10 million people, be evacuated overnight? Where are all these people supposed to go? What happens to those who can’t leave? Are they all going to be killed? I couldn’t process how stupid and unrealistic such an order was. It felt similar to ordering the evacuation of New York City!
But none of that mattered in that moment.
Eventually, we gave in and started packing. We were five people, with two cats, one car, and no real plan. Somehow, my sisters managed to book a second car and find a house in a rural town about two hours away from Tehran.
Around 7:00 in the morning, we finally left.
We packed our entire lives into a few bags, took our cats, and left our home for an unknown period of time.
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The moment I sat in the car and we started moving away from our neighborhood, I suddenly burst into tears. It felt like everything I had been holding in over the past few days finally came out.
It was also the first time I had left the house since the war started.
Tehran, in those early morning hours, looked completely different — quiet, almost empty, with smoke from explosions rising in the distance. It didn’t look anything like the busy, chaotic, alive and lovely city I knew.
We reached our destination before noon. It was a small, green village. Many other people from Tehran had come there too.
The calm, the fresh air, the distance from the war — made me feel better. We stayed there for a few days. This allowed us to recover a bit, get some sleep, and rest far from the sound of explosions and warplanes. It was a much-needed break.
But as time passed and there was still no sign of a ceasefire, we started to wonder how long we could stay there. What if the war didn’t end soon?
Checking with our neighbour and hearing that our home and area in Tehran had remained relatively safe gave us enough reassurance to go back.
So, we left the village for Tehran on June 22, the morning after Trump carried out the famous “Operation Midnight Hammer,” in which they struck three major nuclear facilities in Iran, including Fordow.
We were back home, but the war was still going on. However, with Fordow being attacked, to us it felt like the end of this war could be close. It felt like they had destroyed their most impotant target, Iran’s nuclear facilities, the very thing that had been the main reason for this decades-long conflict, tension, and aggression.
Two days later, on June 24, a ceasefire was announced unexpectedly. While it was a huge relief and I was happy that the war had stopped, I was afraid it wouldn’t last long. I didn’t trust any of the involved parties to hold it, especially Israel, which has a history of breaking ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon — not once or twice, but hundreds of times. So, it took me two or three days to trust that the war had ended and we could return to “normal life.”
But our lives after those 12 days never felt normal again, and we weren’t the same people. Having lived in Iran my whole life, I’ve seen my country go through many ups and downs — from nationwide protests and unrest to economic crises, and natural disasters… Life has always had its challenges in Iran, but this war, to me, felt like a turning point in the recent history of the country. It was as if we had seen the worst thing that could happen, and we no longer had anything to lose — as if we had gone numb.
The ceasefire started on June 24, 2025, but as the name clearly suggests, it was a ceasefire, not a permanent end to war. The shadow of war persisted in our lives, even if there were no explosions or exchanges of fire. The following months were filled with uncertainty, economic hardship, political tension, and all kinds of challenges that made life harder and harder for ordinary people.
The accumulated pressure finally showed itself in the last days of 2025. Nationwide protests broke out across Iran, driven by economic strain and the aftermath of the war. We witnessed one of the biggest uprisings, and we saw tragic things that can’t be described. The details, scale, casualties, and full extent of what happened in December 2025 remain unclear to this day. The protests gradually subsided in early January 2026, after a combination of security measures, arrests, internet restrictions, and mounting pressure.
The momentum of that moment may have weakened under pressure and fatigue, but the underlying conditions — economic hardship, inflation, deteriorating living standards — continued to worsen.
In early February, as the situation became more severe, the talk of negotiations with the US came up again. For many people, even the mention of negotiations had started to feel like an ugly joke. After everything we had seen and been through, we already knew they were unlikely to go anywhere. And this time, with the US openly threatening that if no agreement was reached, they would attack Iran, we were all, in a way, prepared for another war. We just didn’t know exactly when.
As expected, the February negotiations failed to produce a breakthrough and stalled once again.
Eventually, on February 28, 2026, the US and Israel launched coordinated attacks on Iran. This time, we weren’t surprised at all. It was Saturday morning, the first working day of the week. Around 10 a.m. Tehran time, the first wave of attacks was carried out. My father and I were at home, but my sisters were at work, and my mother was downtown, close to where some of the major explosions happened.
Our home is far from the areas that were heavily struck in central Tehran, but the attacks were so intense that I remember hearing faint, distant explosions and thinking it might be construction work or something similar. It didn’t catch my attention — until I learned what was happening from a phone call from my sister. She called briefly and said, “Israel has attacked. Call mom and tell her to come back home immediately. I’m also coming home.”
Unlike the previous time, when I was shocked by the news, this time I wasn’t. I was just worried about my mom, who was downtown. I called her and told her what had happened. She was relatively calm and said, “Yeah, people are saying things — I wasn’t sure if it was just rumors.” I told her the news was confirmed and asked her to come home as soon as possible.
The news spread quickly, and people shut down work and whatever they were doing outside and rushed home.
There is a school across from our home — I can see it from my room’s window. Around 30 minutes after the news was confirmed, parents lined up in front of the school to take their children home. The sounds of cars honking, children crying, parents trying to calm them down, teachers trying to manage the situation, kids hugging and saying goodbye to their friends… filled the street.
Eventually, the school shut down, and the street became quiet. My sisters and my mother got home. Here we were again — a second war in less than a year.
This time, we were more prepared. With the talk of war circulating for weeks, we had taken some measures. We had stocked canned food, candles, torches, a few gallons to store water, packed our important documents into a bag, bought extra food for the cats, charged power banks — anything we could think of. And this time, we were sure we wouldn’t leave Tehran.
Where could we go? How long could we stay away from home? That wasn’t really a choice for us. It also felt like a form of emotional resistance. There were no occupying forces coming to take our homes like in Palestine — our kind of war was different — but leaving still felt like giving in, like showing fear to those who had started this war. We didn’t want that. And from what we heard from friends and relatives, many others had made the same decision.
We entered this war with more experience, but the scale of attacks, the casualties, the intensity, and the duration were all far greater than before. It was on another level. There were nights when the whole house shook and the windows felt like they were on the verge of breaking from nearby explosions. There were nights when we heard the constant sound of warplanes flying very close overhead, keeping us on edge until they finally left the area. We experienced moments beyond what we thought we could tolerate.
And then came the worst night.
On April 8, when Trump issued an ultimatum demanding Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz, he warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran failed to comply. His deadline was set for around 3:30 a.m. Tehran time. That night, many people panicked, fearing that the US might attack vital infrastructure — electricity, water — and push us into even more severe conditions. The thought of losing electricity or water was terrifying, unimaginable.
But somehow, I had gone numb. Knowing there was nothing I could do, that everything was completely out of people’s hands, I went to sleep — almost as if I had accepted my fate.
We all went to sleep, except for my younger sister, who said, “I’ll stay awake to see what happens at 3:30.”
And then, around half an hour before the deadline, a ceasefire was announced. My sister woke me up and, almost indifferently, said, “A two-week ceasefire was announced.”
I replied, “Ah, ok,” and went back to sleep.
In the following days, a new round of talks between the US and the Islamic Republic was arranged — like always, without any result.
Now that I’m writing this, it’s two weeks later — Wednesday, April 22. The ceasefire has been extended again by Trump, this time for an unknown period, saying: “The time for Iran to take the initiative has come… We will extend the ceasefire until Iran’s proposal is submitted, and discussions are concluded, one way or the other.”
Reading the news today, I feel my body starting to react physically. I felt nauseous, like I wanted to throw up — to throw up the unbearable uncertainty, the rage I feel about what these politicians are doing to the lives of ordinary people, the helplessness…
As of today, there is still no hope that the situation will get better, or even move in any direction — good or bad. It feels like a dead end. And while politicians are busy feeding their egos, satisfying their insatiable desire for power, trying to prove they are stronger than the other side, filling the news with nonsense…
I can think of nothing but the ordinary people of my country — people being crushed under this pressure, losing their jobs, struggling more and more to put food on their tables, losing their hope, their future, their very limited belongings.
I can think of nothing but a country that was already under immense pressure — and how the war has made it worse, to an extent that I don’t even have the words to fully explain it.
Nazanin Moayed
April 22, 2026
