As Iran awaits possible retaliation strikes by Israel, its senior officials threatened to hit back with force and the armed forces were placed on highest alert. But in interviews and on social media and virtual town hall discussions, many Iranians said anxiety about an unpredictable war with Israel was spreading.
In telephone interviews with more than a dozen Iranians in different cities, men and women across political divides said they did not want or support a war with Israel or the United States. They said that their lives were already a struggle due to a terrible economy, American sanctions, corruption and oppression. War could exacerbate these hardships and plunge the country into more chaos.
“Nobody I know has prepared for a possible war. We are jarred, let us have our normal life. We are not willing or want to enter a war era,” Mahdieh, a 41-year-old engineer in Tehran, said in a phone interview. She asked her last name not be published out of fear of retribution. She said she and her husband had prepared an emergency bag with their documents in case they needed to leave Tehran.
A viral message shared on social media by many Iranians read, “NO WAR,” and “Which bunkers will you use to shield the people? How will you repair damaged infrastructure? There is no good in war, do not lay ruin to Iran.”
On Monday Iran launched 180 ballistic missiles into Israel in retaliation for Israel’s killing of its top regional ally, the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, that of a senior Iranian general in Beirut and that of the political leader of Hamas in Tehran. Israel has said it plans to respond by attacking Iran; its potential targets include military bases for the Revolutionary Guards Corps and oil refineries.
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian traveled to Qatar on Wednesday to attend a conference of the Organization of Islamic Countries, where he said that Iran did not seek war, saying “there are no winners in war, we know this.” And then he warned, “Iran will respond stronger if Israel makes the slightest mistake.”
Iran’s mission to the United Nations said in a statement that Tehran and Washington had exchanged messages through their official intermediary in Tehran in the aftermath of the attack on Israel. The statement said that Iran considered any country that assisted Israel in an attack on Iran “an accomplice and a legitimate target.”
According to two Iranian officials, who are familiar with the war planning and were not authorized to speak publicly, Iran had asked Russia for cooperation with satellite intelligence ahead of an Israeli strike.
But despite the official saber rattling, even some supporters of the government who had cheered the attacks on Israel were now confronting the realities of an all-out war that could take out infrastructure and harm the economy. Facing that possibility, some said they hoped Israel’s response would be limited and any tit-for-tat strikes would end quickly.
“We had to slap it [Israel] in the face, otherwise it would keep moving forward,” said Hamidreza Jalaeipour, a prominent sociologist close to the reformist faction, in a discussion on the application Clubhouse. “If there is a war, it will be imposed on us.”
Mr. Jalaeipour said he predicted that in the event of war the majority of Iranians would rally behind the flag to defend their country forcefully and put divisions aside.
But discontent against the government runs deep, and in waves of protests, notably in the women-led uprising in 2022, demonstrators called for the toppling of the ruling clerics. The loyalty and ideological fervor of the early years of the revolution — when even teenagers volunteered for the front lines of the eight-year war the country was then fighting with Iraq — has given way to despair and frustration with the status quo.
Some opponents of the government said they were angry that Iran had struck Israel in the first place, placing the lives and safety of its own citizens at risk for a cause outside its own borders. In anti-government protests in previous years, people have chanted, “No to Gaza, No to Lebanon, my life for Iran.”
And now that Israeli attacks seemed likely and imminent, the government had not announced any emergency provisions to prepare the population for war.
“Most of us are not happy about the interference of the Islamic Republic in the region and its so-called proxies. People do not want their national resources to be spent abroad,” said Mahan, a 50-year-old doctor in the northern city of Rasht. “The most pressing feeling these days, both for myself and the majority of friends and people I know, is the fear and worry of war.”
