Three months in, the numbers emerging from the latest war waged by Israel and the US are harrowing. More than 1,600 civilians have been killed in Iran since 28 February, and 3.2 million people are internally displaced. US strikes have obliterated apartment blocks and residential areas all over the country. Schools, hospitals and sport centres have been hit.
Behind every number is a family like that of Mohammadreza and Marzieh Ahmadi. Their children were killed in the US airstrikes on Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, which killed 156 people just one hour after the war began. When Mohammadreza dropped his son and daughter off that morning, 10-year-old Sobhan tumbled out of the car and grabbed his younger sister Hanieh in a bear hug.
Mohammadreza told the Guardian that at the time he thought, “I am lucky to have a son who cares so much for his sister”. Marzieh went through years of miscarriages before Sobhan was born. He was developmentally delayed, and the family devoted themselves to helping him learn to speak. Just hours after Mohammadreza dropped his children off, the first US missile slammed into the school. Sobhan survived the first strike. He escaped to the playground, but his sister was missing. He ran back inside to find her.
When Mohammadreza arrived at the morgue later to identify his children, the Guardian reported, “Hanieh’s skull was fractured, but her face was intact. And he recognised Sobhan immediately, at first glance, even though he was severely injured. Both his legs were broken. He was missing an eye. Half his face was gone.”
Oil infrastructure has also been attacked, with far-reaching human and environmental consequences. On 7 March, Israel attacked four major oil depots around Tehran, leading to oil fires that caused an enormous plume of heavy black smoke to engulf much of the city. “The city looked apocalyptic”, a woman in north-west Tehran told Human Rights Watch. Days later, Iran’s deputy health minister told Al Jazeera that the plume had created acid rain, which “is already contaminating the soil and water supply”, the Iranian Red Crescent warning it can also cause skin burns and severe lung damage.
In Lebanon, Israel is using scorched earth tactics. The Israel Defence Force has posted public videos showing the controlled detonation of entire villages along the Lebanon-Israel border, rigging houses with explosives and turning them into rubble with the press of a button. In early February, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun accused Israel of spraying farms in the south with cancer-causing herbicides to destroy agriculture. And late last year, Israel used white phosphorus to scorch Harj al-Raheb, an important forest on the border.
Roughly 1.2 million people, one-fifth of the population, have been displaced. Six hundred thousand of them will never return if Israel has its way. A further 1,200 have been killed. In March, Israel issued expulsion orders for Beirut’s southern suburbs, the Bekaa Valley and Baalbek in the east, and much of southern Lebanon. The IDF invaded and gained control of roughly 14 percent of Lebanon’s territory, initially taking land south of the Litani River and systematically destroying the bridges that cross it. In early April, the IDF indicated the area it planned to occupy long term, which included 10 percent of Lebanon.
Israel seeks to expand its territorial control and force Hezbollah northward. Hezbollah is a political party with a mass base among the Shi’ite community which operates like a state within a state. Its military wing has been the only bulwark against Israel in the south of the country since the later years of the Lebanese civil war.
Israel has consistently refused to define its own borders, and has repeatedly invaded Lebanon since 1978. In early April, 18 Israeli lawmakers from far-right parties including Likud wrote an open letter pushing for a full occupation up to the Litani River. The river is an important source of fresh water in an arid region. In 1919, Chaim Weizmann, the head of the World Zionist Organization, wrote a letter to British Prime Minister David Lloyd George to push for the river to be a key water source of the future Israeli state. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, argued at that time for the river to form Israel’s northern border, and revived the idea in the late 1940s. The claim to the river is also associated with Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of revisionist Zionism and a spiritual forefather of Israel’s far right.
For years, many of the terrible fantasies of Israel’s most extreme political figures were not posed as realistic options. The current Gaza genocide changed that. Trump and Netanyahu are burning and blasting their way through the region. The capitalists and the political establishment the world over are letting it happen.
