Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
It was the first morning of the working week. Children had arrived at school, employees had sat down in their offices, and shops were open. Then the bombings began.
Residents of Iran’s capital had been on edge for weeks as US President Donald Trump ramped up tensions with the Islamic republic. But it still came as a shock when, at 9.38am local time on Saturday, they began to hear loud explosions that reverberated across the city.
As plumes of smoke rose above Tehran, the streets filled with traffic jams as people rushed home to check on their families. It was quickly clear that the US and Israel had struck.
“I was doing my routine morning exercises outdoors when I heard the explosions,” said a retired woman who lives in Ekbatan, in western Tehran. “Everyone was running back home. So did I. People were telling each other that the supreme leader’s and the president’s office were hit.”
The attacks on the capital included strikes in the Pasteur Street area, close to both the supreme leader and president’s compounds. Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi told NBC that President Masoud Pezeshkian and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were still alive “as far as I know”.
A shopkeeper close to Pasteur Street said: “The explosion was so massive that we thought a whole mall was destroyed.” The shopping centre was less damaged than locals had thought but immediately closed its doors, he said.
Video footage posted to social media and verified by the FT showed rubble, fires and burning cars in a street that was hit in Tehran’s Narmak area, where former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lives. Three of his bodyguards were killed, Iranian newswires reported, without specifying whether Ahmadinejad was alive.
Further strikes were reported across the country, from Chabahar in the south-east to central Isfahan and Tabriz in the north-west.
Parents dashed to collect their children from school. Others panic-shopped for food or headed to cash machines, worried that banks could be shut down. Queues formed at petrol stations and bakeries.
By noon, all the stores in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar had closed. After the US and Israel struck despite ongoing talks between Tehran and the Trump administration, one shopkeeper in the traditional market said: “It seems there cannot be a peace deal without a big war first.”
The strikes hit an already traumatised population. Israel’s 12-day war against Iran last year — which the US briefly joined — remains fresh in the minds of Iranians, who are also still coming to terms with the authorities’ brutal crackdown against anti-regime protesters last month, which killed thousands.
Ali, who works for a private company, immediately went to buy powdered milk for his child, but found that pharmacies’ shelves had been cleared: only after visiting 15 stores did he find milk supplies.
State television urged people not to panic and claimed that Iran’s retaliatory attacks on US and Israeli targets in the region had been successful.
“It’s the war situation, true,” the state television presenter said. “But to do panic shopping . . . will make things more complicated for you.”
The broadcaster said Tehran’s metro would keep operating until midnight, buses would run as usual “with maximum capacity” and firefighters were “100 per cent ready” for any emergency. It quoted state bodies saying there were no shortages of foodstuffs and petrol and no reports of water or electricity cuts.
But the presenter warned: “Americans have entered into an irreversible path . . . this is going to turn it into a regional war.”
Trump said on Saturday that the US and Israel had launched a “massive and ongoing operation” against the Islamic republic and called on Iranians to overthrow their government.
Araghchi responded furiously to the assault, calling it a “gross violation of the basic principles of the UN Charter and a blatant crime against international peace and security”. He urged states in the region not to allow their territory to be used for the attacks.
Iranian state media said schools had been hit in Saturday’s strikes: one in Narmak, one in Qazvin, west of Tehran, and another in Minab in southern Iran.
A missile strike on a primary school in Minab killed 63 people, including schoolchildren, and injured 92, Minab’s governor said.
A senior hardline cleric, Mahmoud Nabavian, told state television that Iran’s troops were steadfast. “Our fighters have not gone home since the June war. This is what love in God does,” he said, claiming that “victory is at hand more than any time before”.
Samaneh, a 34-year-old woman who works at a beauty salon, said there was an element of relief in the start of strikes after weeks of fear.
“What kind of life is this?” she said. “I just need this situation to go to one direction so we know where we stand . . . I feel sick of this level of uncertainty.”