The human cost of Israel and America’s air campaign on Iran is mounting, nowhere more painfully felt than in the children’s wards of its hospitals.
In the intensive care unit of one, four-year-old Anita lies in a coma with severe head injuries a few days after being pulled out of the rubble of her home when it was destroyed in an air strike.
Her mother Zeiba was in torment, clutching her tiny hand and begging her to wake up. Doctors say she almost certainly never will.
Later, I asked her if she had a message for Donald Trump about this war.
“Why did this happen to us?” she said, pausing to let out her tears.
“To innocent people, my innocent four-year-old girl, who was only going downstairs to come to me, why do it to ordinary people like us?
“We were sitting together at home, they have taken away our safety, our happiness, and the health of our children.”
Anita had been playing with her 14-year-old brother and was coming down the stairs, answering their mother’s call, when the missile came in.
It was terrifying, he told us: “Suddenly, everywhere went black. I didn’t understand what happened next. I didn’t hear a sound, nothing… I thought I was dreaming.”
Israel and America are calling their airstrikes precision-targeted. The term often loses most of its meaning when you see the impact on the ground.
Civilians are being hurt in the air campaign here because some airstrikes are being used on targets in residential areas. That is abundantly clear in places like Resalat in eastern Tehran.
Here, missiles have devastated a huge area the size of a city block. There was a Basij or paramilitary security force base here, say residents, but civilian apartments too, many of them.
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We could see the impact of several direct hits on two apartment blocks. We met Seyed Hossein Sane, whose daughter had been at home when the missiles struck mid-afternoon. He’d been at work.
35-year-old Seyedeh Farideh’s body was pulled out of the rubble and identified three days later.
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Seyed had this message for the leader of whichever country sent the missiles: “I wish the same thing would happen to them that they would have to identify the body of their youth with their own hands. Them and their families.
“Same as what I did to the body of my daughter after three days, I wish that for whoever caused this.”
Israelis and Americans say their airstrikes are the best way of achieving their war aims, regime change among them.
But the longer they go on, the greater the human cost and anguish.
