At 5 a.m., a huge explosion rippled through central Tehran, the Iranian capital, which has borne the brunt of a US-Israeli bombing campaign since February 28.
“The sound wasn’t extremely loud, but it felt like an earthquake and shook the entire building,” a woman in Tehran, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons, told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda on March 13.
The massive US-Israeli bombardment has targeted military, police, and intelligence sites, but also damaged or destroyed homes, hospitals, and oil depots serving the around 10 million people living in the city.
Around 1,300 civilians have been killed and some 3.2 million people internally displaced across the country of 90 million people since the war began, according to the UN and rights groups.
The woman in Tehran said her apartment building is located near a hospital, a university, and a government office. But that, she said, has not spared her neighborhood.
“Even having a hospital nearby no longer gives me a sense of safety,” she said. “Now even being inside my home doesn’t feel safe.”
Blast Waves
She said bombs have hit Tehran every few hours. “I don’t know what kind of bombs they are using now,” she said, adding that the powerful blasts “destroy houses several streets away due to the blast wave.”
“Houses near the explosion sites are basically completely uninhabitable, with only a few structural columns left standing,” she said.
Iranians are living through a second war in less than a year. In June 2025, Israel and the United States targeted Iran’s military and nuclear sites during a 12-day war. Tehran retaliated by firing hundreds of rockets at Israel and US military bases in the Middle East.
But the war last year, the woman in Tehran said, pales in comparison to the current conflict.
“Compared to what is happening now, the 12-day war was honestly nothing -- almost a joke,” she said. “It feels like that earlier [conflict] was just meant to prepare us for a much bigger war and a much deeper sense of fear.”
There are no signs that the war is abating. US-Israeli air strikes continue to strike military sites and nuclear facilities across Iran. Tehran has been firing ballistic missiles and drones at Israel, US military and diplomatic facilities across the Middle East, and critical energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf.
The woman in Tehran who spoke to Radio Farda said “people feel almost trapped” in the city.
Ghost Town
“People are afraid to leave the city because they think, what if the road gets hit while we’re driving?” she said, referring to US-Israeli strikes on security checkpoints and a major highway in Tehran in recent days.
She said Tehran, usually a bustling city choked by traffic, resembles a ghost town now.
Tehran’s streets, she said, “are extremely empty and silent” as many people stay indoors. “There are many offices and hotels around here, but almost everything is dark [at night] -- as if everyone has left,” she said.
Few civilians are on the streets. “Instead, you see people who are clearly military or security personnel, or people in plain clothes who we assume are security agents,” she said.
