A week of war that left Iran stunned and bloodied
In the week since Israel first unleashed its surprise attack on Iran, many of the assumptions underpinning the balance of power in the Middle East have been swept away, leaving the fate of the region more uncertain than at any time since the Arab spring.
Iranian defences, which had once seemed so formidable, crumbled in the first minutes as the bombs began to fall soon after 3.30am on the morning of Friday 13th.
Like the Palestinians of Gaza, the people of Tehran now know what it is like to look upwards and see Israeli drones hovering above them, and to receive evacuation orders from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on social media, telling them when to abandon their own homes.
Some of the crown jewels of Iran's nuclear programme – built up over a quarter of century and identified by the Islamic Republic regime as being synonymous with the nation's very sovereignty and identity – lay in ruins by the end of the first week of Israeli bombardment.
The above-ground uranium enrichment hall in Natanz was destroyed in the initial wave, along with the facility's power plant. The interruption in electricity supply was likely to have ruined many of the delicate centrifuges spinning at very high speeds enriching uranium hexafluoride gas in the underground facilities, according to an assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The nuclear complex outside the ancient city of Isfahan was also pounded in one of the opening salvoes, which hit its uranium conversion plant and another facility for making nuclear fuel for reactors. Satellite images emerged showing these sites pockmarked with holes.
The regime in Tehran, with all its pretensions of being a regional power, had told its population that the privations it had suffered over decades were a necessary sacrifice for the nation's defence against its enemies, near and far. But under fire, the Islamic Republic was impotent to protect its own people, or even its top generals.
The Iranian leadership appears to have stuck to the conventional wisdom that Israel could not destroy Iran's deeply buried facilities such as the underground chambers at Isfahan and more importantly the Fordow enrichment plant, built into the side of a mountain, without US help.
That assumption, at least, did turn out to be half true. By Monday, Israeli bombs appeared to have burrowed their way down to the Isfahan subterranean facility, but after a week, Israeli officials were still saying they needed US help to do significant damage to Fordow.
What Iran did not expect was that Benjamin Netanyahu would start the war without US participation in the attack. Israeli officials said they had received a tacit green light from Donald Trump and guarantees of assistance in defence, though not in offence.
By defying expectations and going to war anyway, Israel's prime minister gained the great advantage of total surprise. Iranian intelligence had been lulled into complacency by plans for a sixth round of US-Iran negotiations due to take place last Sunday, and by Trump's public remarks warning that an Israel attack would 'blow' the chances for his own diplomacy.
Iran's spies would have also noted that Netanyahu's son's wedding was due on Monday, and that the prime minister was planning to take a few days off. Surely the long-threatened war would wait.
When the bombs began to fall on Friday then, the shock was absolute. The first wave killed the head of the Revolutionary Guards, Gen Hossein Salami, and the army chief of staff, Maj Gen Mohammad Bagheri, the nation's top military commanders, among several generals targeted.
Six of Iran's nuclear scientists were also killed, most if not all by airstrikes on their homes. By the end of the week, the Israelis claimed to have killed 14 scientists in an attempt to wipe out Iran's nuclear knowhow.
In the first sortie, 200 Israeli warplanes hit 100 distinct targets in part of an intricately planned operation, codename Rising Lion, which had been at least eight months in the making.
The success Israel had in destroying Iranian air defences in a previous missile strike in October convinced the Israeli leadership that it had opened up a window of opportunity, during which Iran would be uniquely vulnerable, but the window would close over time.
Netanyahu said this week that Rising Lion was originally planned for April. However, the timetable was set back two months to allow Trump an opportunity to strong-arm Iran into giving up its enrichment programme at the negotiating table, so he could claim to have averted a new war in the Middle East.
In a letter in March to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Trump gave diplomacy 60 days to produce results and the clock began to tick with the first meeting between American and Iranian negotiators in Oman on 12 April. Last Thursday 12 June, was day 61 on that calendar, and that night the Israeli fighter-bomber squadrons took off for targets 1,000 miles (1,600km) away.
Trump later claimed to have been in the loop all along. He bristled at the suggestion that he was merely given a 'heads-up'. It was far more than that, he claimed.
It now appears that, having decided to attack after Trump's 60-day pause, the timetable for Rising Lion was locked in by military requirements. The Mossad special forces and drones had been put in place inside Iran, specifically to target the sinews of Iran's ability to strike back – its air defence and its ballistic missile launchers. They could not be left behind the lines for long. Their discovery would have compromised the whole operation.
In the preceding days, as the rumours of war swirled around the region, Iran boasted it was primed to strike back with devastating effect. In the event, it was hamstrung. The generals who were supposed to give the orders were already dead by the time Iran knew it was under attack.
The only Iranian response in the first hours of the war were 100 drones, which were easily shot down by Israel and the US before they reached Israeli territory. By the end of last Friday, Iran's hastily appointed replacement commanders had scrambled to launch 200 ballistic missiles. Israel was able to intercept most with its multi-tiered, US-supported air defences, with Israeli interceptors rising up in clusters to meet the incoming threat, lighting up the night sky.
A handful of Iranian strikes hit home, however, killing Israelis in Tel Aviv and Rishon LeZion who had not sought shelter.
Over the course of the first week of the war, the confirmed Israeli death toll had reached 24, less than a 10th of the number of Iranian civilians killed by Israeli pilots striking residential areas in their hunt for regime figures and scientists.
In response to the first Israeli casualties, the defence minister, Israel Katz, vowed that 'Tehran will burn' if Khamenei continued to fight back with missiles. The Iranian missile salvoes kept coming throughout the week, however, though with smaller numbers in each barrage, as Israel hunted down and destroyed Iranian launchers.
By Friday, IDF briefers claimed to have destroyed two-thirds of the estimated 400 launchers Iran had started the war with, suggesting Israel could be winning the race to blunt Iran's primary deterrent before Israel ran out of stocks of its most effective and expensive missile interceptor, the Arrow 3.
Meanwhile, it was Iranian civilians who took the brunt of the war. Over the course of the week, the roads out of Tehran have been clogged by families using their 25-litre fuel ration to try to flee the capital. The obstacles to leaving the city were doubled when one of the main routes out, the road to Qom, was blocked by bombing.
Related: Fear and shock in Iran: 'I'm constantly afraid a missile might hit my home'
From the first day of the offensive, it was clear that Israel was aiming at more than Iran's nuclear and missile programme. A gas refinery on the coast was hit, as was an oil storage facility on the outskirts of Tehran. Israeli leaders have referred to these as 'ayatollah regime targets', the pillars of the Iranian economy.
Netanyahu has been increasingly clear that, while regime change was not a formal war aim, it was the desired outcome. Visiting a damaged hospital in Beersheba on Thursday, the prime minister called on Iranians to rise up against their rulers, while Katz declared that Khamenei 'cannot continue to exist'.
For all the Israeli grandstanding in the wake of a week of constant military successes, the ultimate outcome of the war hung in the balance on Friday. Trump declared he would take up to two weeks to decide whether he would send in US bombers into the fray, to target Fordow and other hard targets, potentially including Khamenei himself.
The announcement appeared to create an opportunity for diplomacy, with foreign ministers from the UK, France and Germany meeting their Iranian counterpart in Geneva. It was questionable whether anything short of a complete Iranian surrender of the right to enrich uranium would satisfy Trump, and it would definitely fall short of Israeli demands.
With US involvement, the damage inflicted on Iran would undoubtedly be more profound, but it is far from evident it would bring down the Iranian regime.
The only real certainty as the war enters it second week, regardless of whether American planes join the Israel air force in the skies over Iran, is that the misery of ordinary Iranians is sure to deepen.
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