Poetess Buried With Her Dreams, Child Crushed In Sleep: Faces Of Civilian Lives Lost In Israel’s Bombing Of Tehran

Clockwise: Poetess Parnia Abbasi, rising tennis star Parsa Mansour, photographer Ehsan Bayrami and Pilates instructor Niloufar Ghalehvand

New Delhi: Their lives had nothing to do with war. Still, they were taken by it in a matter of seconds. Said to be aimed at dismantling military and nuclear installations, Israeli air strikes on Iranian soil have killed hundreds in the past week. Away from the military maps and talking points, real lives have been reduced to rubble. In homes, cafes, dorm rooms and streets, the victims include students, artists, teachers and parents.

These are some of their stories.

Niloufar Ghalehvand was sipping coffee with her friend the night before her death. A 32-year-old Pilates instructor from Ozgol Street in northern Tehran, she dreamed of one day launching her own fitness channel. She never got the chance.

A missile, likely targeting a senior military official living nearby, hit her building in the early hours. Niloufar died with her parents – ordinary civilians with no ties to politics or war.

“She was full of dreams. Her birthday was just weeks away,” Al Jazeera quoted one of her friends as saying.

Parsa Mansour, a rising star in paddle tennis, was asleep when his window exploded. The 27-year-old athlete lived with his parents in Shahrara, a densely packed residential district in Tehran. His father survived, but Parsa did not.

He trained alone, without sponsors or a coach. He made it to the top with no support. That is who he was. Now, there is silence where there used to be laughter.

Parnia Abbasi, 23, was a poet who worked at the National Bank of Iran. She had just moved into a new apartment with her family. Her dream was to pursue a postgraduate degree. She loved writing about hope in dark times. One of her poems reads, “I burn, I fade, I become a silent star, that turns into smoke in your sky…”

That smoke, her friend says, is all that remained after a missile levelled their apartment block on Sattarkhan Street. She was killed with her parents and 14-year-old brother.

Ehsan Bayrami, 35, a freelance photographer who covered sporting events, was killed while walking home from a work meeting. An explosion ripped through the Tajrish district, just meters from where he had passed minutes earlier.

He was warned by his friend that morning to stay alert, to which he had replied that “they only bomb at night”.

It was noon.

Amin Ahmad, 30, was a taekwondo athlete. His father, a retired schoolteacher, had saved for decades to build their house in eastern Tehran. When the missile hit, Amin saw his father thrown out of the house, his face and ears badly burned.

He watched him die. The rest in the family escaped out from the window. But Ahmad could not.

The stories keep coming. An 8-year-old equestrian champion. A university professor grading papers in her living room. A graphic designer who once filmed for National Geographic.

The Iranian Ministry of Health says at least 639 people have died in the ongoing attacks, 263 of them civilians. Another 1,300 are wounded.

Iran has launched hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel in retaliation, killing more than 24 and injuring over 400. But for many Iranians, the pain is not in the numbers, it is in the empty chairs, the unanswered phones and the birthdays that will never come.

Some victims have names. Some remain unidentified. All of them had lives that never belonged to war.