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The police station in Gisha, a middle-class neighbourhood in western Tehran, was a barely recognisable pile of broken concrete and brick, with only its steel structural pillars still standing and the warped and twisted frames of green-and-white police cars littering its courtyard.
But a policeman guarding the site told curious local residents that only one officer was killed when the compound became one of hundreds of government sites across Iran targeted by US and Israeli air strikes. Two other bodies pulled from the rubble of the station, which had been mostly evacuated before the attack on Sunday, were of visiting civilians.
The compound was on a list of targets that has extended far beyond military sites and the top echelons of Iran’s government and security forces to encompass police and court buildings and the state broadcaster.
The scope of the assault and the increasing damage and casualties among the wider population have alarmed even some of those Iranians who might otherwise have supported attacks on a regime they loathe.
“We asked for limited targeted strikes against specific targets and not continuous 24-hour bombardment that devastates our homeland,” said Romina, a university student who, like others interviewed for this story, used a pseudonym. “If this is meant to rescue us, then why does it feel like our homeland is being destroyed instead?”
Iran’s Red Crescent humanitarian group said on Tuesday that 787 people had been killed by US and Israeli attacks on 504 locations across 153 cities since the war began.
A strike on a girls’ primary school in southern Iran on Saturday killed 165 people, most of them young children, according to Iranian authorities. An attack on a police station in central Tehran late on Sunday severely damaged nearby residential units, leaving civilians dead and injured.
On Monday, the head of Tehran’s emergency services and several staff members were wounded in a strike that damaged their building. Other attacks have forced the evacuation of the capital’s Gandhi hospital and caused extensive damage to a Red Crescent building and three hospitals near Tehran’s Vanak Square.
There are also growing concerns about damage to historic sites. A police station at Tehran’s Grand Bazaar that is one of the country’s oldest was hit on Monday. Damage was also reported at the nearby Golestan Palace, a Unesco World Heritage site.
Donald Trump has suggested the attacks on Iran could intensify even further. “We’re knocking the crap out of them,” the US president told a CNN journalist on Monday. “The big wave hasn’t even happened. The big one is coming soon.”
The extent of the damage inflicted on the Iranian state so far is unclear. Across Tehran, many institutions appeared either closed or operating with minimal staff. Top security official Ali Larijani told state television on Sunday that Israel’s 12-day war on Iran last June had offered lessons for the Islamic republic on how to minimise casualties, though he gave no details.
The government also announced a seven-day public holiday after the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Saturday. Black banners were erected around Tehran, along with posters of Khamenei with the words “His God is alive”. Evening mourning ceremonies for the leader have been held at mosques and urban squares since his death.
Yet many Iranians remain furious over a brutal crackdown on anti-regime protesters in January and — despite deep concern about the future of their country — there has so far been little sign of the emergence of a mass patriotic movement of the kind seen during and after June’s 12-day war. Some fear that the regime could portray any rallying around the flag as support for the Islamic republic.
“That is the place where for years they took our young girls because of their hijab,” said Shahla, a local resident who came to see the damage at the wrecked police compound in Gisha, which had also housed a branch of the morality police that enforces controls on women’s dress.
“For years we lived with the Islamic republic and listened to whatever they said. But what did we get?” she said. “Look at the war they’ve dragged the country into.”
Outside the compound, a woman stood crying. Her cousin had been visiting the police station to complete some paperwork when it was hit, she said. She was eventually told to go to the martyrs’ section of a local cemetery, where victims were being taken for identification.
President Masoud Pezeshkian has sought to reassure the public, saying the government would continue fulfilling its duties despite the attacks.
The police and the Revolutionary Guards’ volunteer paramilitaries had “joined hands” to ensure security across the country and to “provide comfort for the people”, national police chief Ahmad-Reza Radan told state television.
“Forces have been deployed along the roads for travellers. They have even taken responsibility for ensuring the supply of people’s food and fuel,” Radan said.
At the Gisha police station, a young firefighter emerged from the ruins exhausted and covered in the fine grey dust that filled the air and settled on onlookers’ clothes.
The police officer guarding the compound quietly voiced frustration about its lack of readiness for the attack. “There was no proper shelter at the site,” he said. “No siren system and little protection for the staff.”
Standing nearby, Shahla said that despite all the suffering caused by the war, she still hoped it could lead to a better future for Iranians under a new government.
“What rational patriotic person would want their country to be attacked?” she said. “But now that it has come to this, let them strike . . . I’ve put my own life aside. All I think about is my son’s future. I want him to live in a country with a proper economy and security.”
Cartography by Steven Bernard