Panic, blackout, and empty shelves: Tehran's first 24 hours of war

Before dawn on the first day of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, Tehran changed. The explosions came early. Within hours, three things happened simultaneously across the city: a mass exodus toward the highways, a near-total internet blackout, and a rush to strip the shelves of food, fuel, and medicine. None of these was separate events. Together they produced something close to collective paralysis.

Dr Ali Mousavi, an Iranian academic and religious scholar from Qom, was in Tehran when the strikes began and left the capital immediately to be with his family.

"The strikes brought back the atmosphere of the previous war, when people were terrified of being killed in Tehran, especially after Israel kept bombing civilians and their homes," he said.

He was clear that leaving was not surrender. "This is a precautionary step to reduce the risks to civilians, particularly those of us who lived through the last war and know what the losses can look like."

There were no official evacuation orders. There did not need to be. Within hours of the first blasts, the highways leading north and west out of the capital had seized. Thousands of cars lined the exits, families with small bags, children silent in back seats, mothers making broken calls to relatives in other cities.

Several drivers who spoke to The New Arab said they were not fleeing toward any specific place. They were leaving Tehran. Some said they feared the strikes would expand to residential areas near sensitive installations. Others said they did not want to be in a city that might become a military target. The decision, for many, was made under fear and incomplete information rather than any clear instruction.

Petrol stations became flashpoints. Queues stretched hundreds of metres from the first hours of the morning. Drivers filled tanks and brought extra containers. Workers at the stations said supply had not yet been disrupted, but demand had multiplied to a degree they had never seen. Altercations broke out over queue position. Police intervened at several locations.

Zahra Zeindani, a public relations official at one of Tehran University's colleges, was still in the capital by nightfall, unable to move.

"I still haven't been able to leave Tehran because of the congestion on the roads," she said.

She had lived through the previous war, in which Israeli strikes had hit the street where she was living, killing dozens of civilians. She fled to Gilan then. She planned to do the same now, but was waiting for the roads to clear.

"I plan to move at night to my grandmother's house in Gilan and stay there until the war is over," she added.

Adnan Al-Ahwazi, a scholar at the Faculty of Theology and Islamic Studies at the University of Tehran, sent his family to Zahedan and stayed behind to follow events directly.

 He described two simultaneous flows of people leaving the country.

"The situation involves tens of thousands of citizens moving toward Turkey through the Kapikoy border crossing, fleeing the killing, and alongside that external displacement, there is an internal one, people trying to escape Tehran for other Iranian cities," al-Ahwazi said.

His security concerns extended beyond the strikes themselves. "The situation in Tehran right now resembles a state of fluidity and disorder. Any hostile force could move with relative freedom inside the capital and exploit the chaos."

Side streets filled as drivers tried to avoid the main arteries. They were blocked, too. The city's outer ring moved in fits and stops through the day while its central districts emptied, quieter than a normal weekday, its roads knotted where they met the exits.

The blackout

Hours after the strikes began, internet speeds plummeted. Access to news platforms and messaging applications was then cut off. Phones that residents relied on for information and to contact family became effectively unusable.

For Masoud Fekri, an Iranian academic and adviser to President Pezeshkian, the National Security Council's advice to leave the capital was neither panicked nor surprising.

"It is understandable, because they know that escalation with America and Israel will push them to bomb civilians," he said. "Calling on residents to temporarily leave the capital does not reflect weakness. It is a considered step within the context of civilian protection, aimed at preserving the lives of as many civilians as possible during potential military escalation."

A father could not reach his son, who was working near one of the targeted sites. A mother spent hours trying to contact her daughter at a university across the city. Families scattered across Tehran lost the ability to locate each other.

Local journalists were unable to verify information or reach sources without a stable connection, forcing some to use landlines or to move between locations, increasing their personal risk. Volunteer coordination networks that had been running on messaging apps went dark. Decisions were made in an information vacuum by people who had no way of knowing whether what they feared was real.

The shelves

By evening, the pressure had shifted from the roads to the shops. Supermarkets across the city were packed with people buying for weeks rather than days. Bottled water, rice, and canned goods were the first to disappear from the shelves. No official announcement had been made about supply disruptions.

That did not matter. The collective memory of previous sanctions periods and past crises had taught people not to wait for an announcement.

Some shops imposed per-person purchase limits to slow the depletion. Others ran out regardless.

Pharmacies were equally crowded. Demand focused on chronic medications: heart, diabetes, and blood pressure, as well as painkillers and antiseptics. Families with elderly relatives bought additional supplies in case access became difficult.

A pharmacist who prefers to stay anonymous told TNA, "No warning of supply disruption had been received, but that experience had made people act as though one was coming."

Any military escalation in Iran is read, immediately, as a threat to financial stability, to the currency, to prices, to the supply chains that have already been degraded by years of sanctions. 

In the residential neighbourhoods, reactions were mixed. Some families stayed home, reasoning that congested highways were more dangerous than familiar walls. Others moved relatives to lower floors or to rooms they considered more sheltered. Mosques and community centres in several districts opened to accommodate those who had nowhere to go.

Through all of it, no one had a clear picture of where the strikes were heading or when they would stop. Tehran, a city of millions, built on noise and density, moved through its first day of war slowly, under a weight it had not felt in this form before.

This story was published in collaboration with Egab. ​​​​​​