What did save Iran after 12 days of Israeli total control of its airspace, which facilitated an extraordinary onslaught on Iran’s Islamic Republic that hit its nuclear programme, destroyed many of its symbols of government, and decapitated its military hierarchy? Suppose you ask Fayyaz Zahed, an Iranian reformist political analyst. In that case, he answers that “it was not the regime’s delusional ideology, but Iran’s ancient history, and the experience of surviving invasions by Alexander the Great, the Mongols, and the Arabs.”

Similar to China’s case, Iran’s rich history and imperial legacy have shaped its self-perception as the center of the civilized world — a nation destined for greatness — and informed its policies in the Middle East and beyond. The arc of Iran’s history spread from centuries of imperial grandeur in antiquity to the moment when the empire faced a new power rising in the south, Islam, thus marking the beginning of a Persian decline and eventual collapse in the 19th century under the imperial ambitions of Great Britain and Russia. Past greatness has made the dire memories of encroachment by foreign powers in the contemporary era an Iranian version of China’s “Century of Humiliation.”

Hence, like China, Iran’s modern history has been a struggle for status befitting a great power, marked by a vigilant jealousy of its sovereignty. A non-Arab country in an Arab region, unique also for being the only state in the Muslim universe having Shia as a state religion, Iran’s external relationship needs to be understood against its self-perceived exceptionalism. Closer to our time, the consequential meaning of the British-American coup that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 laid the groundwork for popular anti-Western sentiment that grew throughout the 1970s, ultimately leading to the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

Since then, there has been a tendency in the West to see Iran as a monolith of Ayatollahs and radicals bent on destroying Israel, for which they need the nuclear bomb. In such a scenario, Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s Churchill, fighting heroically to save his people from imminent annihilation. This, I am afraid, is an utterly simplistic, even false, reading of a far more complex reality. Iran is a richly diverse society, and so is its political class. The division between reformists and fundamentalists within the political system is a genuine one. The Iranian reformists, first among them the current president, Masoud Pezeshkian, and his entire team, want to rein in the nuclear project, reach an accommodation with the West, and bring an end to the sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy. It is there that they perceive the threat to the regime’s survival.

The drive to nuclear status has been an obsession of the Ayatollahs, their most potent symbol, and the insurance for regime survival, the ultimate protective shield of the Islamic revolution against its challengers in the region and beyond. North Korea is their proof. Although the nuclear program has never delivered a bomb, and only scant energy at astronomical cost, it has been the mullahs’ most potent nationalist symbol. Securing the regime’s survival is the objective, not annihilating Israel, which is far more likely to be destroyed at the end of a long war of attrition, for which the Iranians created and lavishly financed the ring of proxies surrounding the Jewish state, than under a mushroom cloud.

If it wanted a nuclear bomb, Iran could have produced it long ago. Iran’s scientific and technological excellence, supported by a rich human capital, makes it far better positioned than North Korea and Pakistan, two nuclear powers, to join the nuclear club. If Iran doesn’t yet have the bomb, it is because it has not yet made the political decision to produce it. This war may have settled the debate inside Iran’s political class in favour of the bomb. Iran’s now demonstrated vulnerability is proof of its need for a nuclear bomb, like North Korea’s, to protect itself.

In other words, Netanyahu will go down in history not as Israel’s Churchill, as he presumes to be, but as the father of the Iranian atom bomb. He has twice torpedoed a diplomatic solution that the Iranians always wanted, first when he convinced Donald Trump in 2018 to withdraw from Obama’s 2015 nuclear agreement, whose provisions the Iranians fulfilled to the letter, and now by starting a war in the middle of a negotiating process over a new nuclear deal.

Moreover, since the end of the Iran War, Netanyahu and his friend in the White House, Donald Trump, are engaged in a campaign of deception that obscures the picture. U.S. intelligence knows better than its own president. Neither Iran’s nuclear programme nor its ballistic missile threat has been obliterated; possibly the atomic project was postponed by only a few months. The Iranians have taken away from the Fordow site more than 400 kilograms of enriched uranium to 60% which can be enriched to 90% in a matter of days, enough to produce 10 warheads. There are undamaged centrifuges, there are enough scientists, and there are unknown sites. Iran has already stopped any watchdog from monitoring its nuclear activities, and it will not be a surprise if it decides to abandon the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty).

Still, this war is a moment of reckoning for the Islamic Republic, as its hollow empire has been diminished by Israel’s breaking of its entire proxy system. Sunni Pan-Arabism has been a fiction, and Shiite Islam was supposed to supplant it as the voice of the masses. Ayatollah Khomeini, the father of the revolution, and his current successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, positioned themselves as the Frantz Fanons of our age who would redeem the wretched of the earth.

But, instead of redemption, what Israel’s combat pilots found lying under the skies of Tehran was an unpopular and repressive Iranian regime that has spent billions of dollars on a nuclear program and on projecting the Islamic Revolution through armed regional proxies, while presiding over a domestic economic disaster and stifling paralysis. Iran’s gross domestic product, or total output, has fallen 45% since 2012. Crippling international sanctions over the nuclear program contributed to this downward spiral, but so did corruption, a bungled privatization program and bloated state companies.

The regime, remote from a youthful and aspirational society, looks sclerotic to many, and its religious leadership is now up against the wall. “The Islamic Republic is a rotten tooth waiting to be plucked, like the Soviet Union in its latter years,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. If we pursue the Chinese simile, China’s political stability requires, according to Xi Jinping, an “overall structure of values,” a structure that in Iran relies on a minority of the people and a corrupt, to the bone, nomenclature that pervades them.

In rethinking its post-war strategy, Iran does not have too many friends to rely on. Its “allies” were a disappointment. Russia is entangled in the Ukrainian quagmire, China is happy seeing the United States consumed by the forever wars of the Middle East, Syria is now negotiating a peace deal with Israel, and Iran’s proxies have all been diminished by Israel.

Still, recent history shows that Iran has always been capable of adapting its policies to its weaknesses. In 1988, to save the regime from destruction, it accepted a dishonoured end to its war with Iraq. In 2003, following the U.S. invasion that had toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan and Iran’s nemesis, Saddam Hussein, in Iraq, the Ayatollahs were willing to reach a Grand Bargain with the American Satan, giving up their entire nuclear programme and dismantling their regional system of proxies.

Alas, the radicals in Tehran proved to be far more rational than the Americans. The answer to Iran’s demarche came from then vice president Dick Cheney. “We do not negotiate with evil,” he said. This is a poignant lesson in the power of stupidity in history. Iran is not in a dissimilar condition these days. It is willing to negotiate with the U.S. a nuclear deal in exchange for shielding the regime from an American or Israeli attack. This is not about a final peace settlement; it is about buying time while the regime regroups and revises its strategy to adapt it to the changing conditions.

Iran’s clash with Israel, a peer competitor for regional supremacy and a bitter theological enemy, is a conflict between two existentially vulnerable powers. This, I would argue, is a typical Thucydides Trap, which Israel would like to see usher in a definite showdown. Israel’s zero-sum game strategy is driven by its Holocaustic fears and unrealistic aspirations to uncontested hegemony. Iran’s idea of the destruction of Israel stems from a Shiite eschatological belief in the return of the last Islamic messiah, Imam Mahdi, amid an Armageddon that the destruction of Israel will trigger.

If history has any lesson in it for Iran, it is that Shi‘ism should avoid falling into the same delusional trap of destroying Israel that had doomed Sunni pan-Arabism. By pouring its energy and resources into a war of annihilation against Israel, it would jeopardize its primary objective: regime survival. Like Xi Jinping, Supreme Leader Khamenei is haunted by the memory of the fall of the Soviet Union. The lessons they both drew are similar: stick to the fundamentals of the regime, only that China is a global power, and Iran is a diminished, decimated power at war with Big Satan standing behind the Little Satan.

But Iran is not alone in letting illusory ambitions cloud its judgment. If Israel cannot destroy Iran’s nuclear program, it certainly cannot achieve total victory over Iran’s regime. The idea of toppling the Iranian regime through a bombing campaign, a design that Netanyahu had clearly set as an objective, was a delusion, a total lack of historical culture. Both Donald Trump’s call for Iran’s “total surrender” and Netanyahu’s drive for regime change through a bombing campaign were delusions, a total lack of historical culture. The Allies’ call for Germany’s “unconditional surrender” in World War II was what kept the Nazi regime to fight to the bitter end. And, regime change requires, as in Iraq, boots on the ground, which in this case would be suicidal to the invaders. In Iran, there are now signs of a patriotic surge even among opponents of the regime who have spent time in prison.

It is, then, not just Iran: none of Israel’s security challenges can be overcome through “total victory.” The Islamic Republic is humiliated and not in a place it’s ever been before, but it could still stay alive long enough to exhaust Israel in a war of attrition and get the United States entangled in a conflict it does not want. No matter how many bombs Netanyahu drops, diplomacy will remain the only answer. Nor could Israel hope for the tacit complicity the Arab states demonstrated in the war against Hamas and Hezbollah. While these countries have no love for Iran, they have a vested interest in regional stability, primarily as they work to diversify their economies. The risk would always remain that a cornered Iran might even attack the Gulf states directly, hitting their oil installations or disrupting transport lanes in the Persian Gulf. These countries want a nuclear deal, not a regional conflagration.

Meanwhile, Israel’s military hubris is becoming inadmissible to its Arab moderate allies. They wanted Israel as an equal partner in a regional peace, not as a new hegemon. Wisely, the Gulf states have in recent years reached out to Iran in quest of stability that would allow them to focus on their economies. Now they are in for years of uncertainty that can adversely affect their grand economic plans and the confidence of foreign investors.

The Middle East is at the threshold of a new chapter that calls for visionary leadership that is capable of thinking in grand diplomatic terms. This means bringing the war in Gaza to an end, opening a political horizon to the Palestinian nation, and extending the Abraham Peace Accords to Syria and Saudi Arabia. But if a new Middle East is what we want to build, Israel needs to assume the diplomatic wisdom that the Gulf States have shown in their rapprochement with Iran. An Israeli-Arab peace should not be a confrontational enterprise against Iran. It must be a step toward integrating Iran into a broader system of peace and security in the region. Iran’s rivals in the Middle East should not take its humiliation as the last destination of the historical process. Iran is a great nation with a formidable history and an extraordinary capacity for resurgence. It is up to its neighbours, Israelis and Arabs, to make it so that this would be a benign, rather than a malignant, comeback.

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How do you cook, charge a cell phone, go to the bathroom, or get to sleep when you’ve lost everything and are living in a displacement camp? Ahmed Abu Kmail, a 38-year-old Palestinian cameraman, is our source of information in this diary from Gaza, where the simplest acts of daily life have become an unimaginable obstacle course.

Since the outbreak of war in October 2023 — during which Israel has killed over 54,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health data, used as a reference by the U.N.— Abu Kmail has been forced to relocate six times with his wife and four children. He is currently surviving in a precarious tent in the center of the Gaza Strip that no longer protects them from either the cold or the heat. His house has been bombed, and he knows that even if there is a ceasefire tomorrow, he will not be able to return. “Nothing in Gaza resembles a normal life,” he repeats at various points in this diary.

1. Hunger

The more than two million inhabitants of Gaza are going hungry, and half a million are expected to be in a dire situation by September if Israel does not allow essential humanitarian aid to enter, according to the latest U.N. data. For Ahmed Abu Kmail, the image of hunger is an old, empty pot. The one held in the hands of the hundreds of people who have been lining up since dawn at the Nuseirat refugee camp, in the center of Gaza, where lentil soup is being distributed. If they are lucky, it will likely be their only meal of the day, but some will leave empty-handed.

“Hunger is a slow death,” says Abu Kmail.

2. Displacement

At least 90% of Gazans have been displaced at least once since October 2023, and 92% of homes have been totally or partially destroyed in the war. Ahmed Abu Kmail has changed shelters six times. Each flight is more painful and complicated than the last: the tent is more tattered, it’s harder to transport their few belongings, and it’s difficult to find a place to sleep, as the majority of the population is concentrated in the center of the Gaza Strip. Above all, they are more tired and demoralized. In this video, Abu Kmail shows us where his children sleep, the area they have converted into a bathroom, and the damaged solar panel where they try to charge their phones. These are the miserable living conditions they have been forced to adapt to overnight. “But despite everything, we haven’t lost hope,” he says.

3. Education

The children of Gaza have not been in school since October 7, 2023, when the war began, and even if there were a ceasefire tomorrow, it will take a long time for them to return. According to the U.N., 90% of schools need to be rebuilt or rehabilitated. But education is finding a way to continue amid the devastation and ruins. Ahmed Abu Kmail takes us to a tent where Hana Abu Rizq, a volunteer teacher, gathers a group of children every day to teach them reading, writing, and addition. We are in a squalid displacement camp, and the tent is stiflingly hot; the children sit on the floor and have barely any notebooks or pencils. “But the idea is to ensure they don’t lose the habit of learning,” the teacher insists.

4. Water

Gaza is on the Mediterranean coast, but drinking water is scarce and has become another weapon in the war. Ahmed Abu Kmail shows us a distribution point at a small desalination plant that is still operating in the center of Gaza. According to the U.N., 89% of Gaza’s pipes, drains, and desalination plants have been completely or partially destroyed, and 90% of families have suffered and continue to suffer from the lack of safe drinking water. People waiting in line do not have to pay to fill their containers, but they do have to wait for several hours.

“The war has taken many things from us, including water,” says Abu Kmail. The WHO recommends a minimum of 15 liters of water per person per day to meet basic needs, but in Gaza right now, they only have around five liters.

5. Fear

The buzzing of Israeli drones in the sky. Day and night. Every day. Gazans have been living like this since October 2023. It’s the sound of fear. Fear also comes from the explosions and bombs that can strike at any time and anywhere. “And suddenly, we’re just numbers,” says Ahmed Abu Kmail, filming children playing soccer on a street in Deir al-Balah, in the center of the Gaza Strip. And when night falls, there is even more anxiety, especially for the children. “I want the drones to go away and the war to end,” says Amir, one of the cameraman’s sons, by the light of the bonfire the family uses to chase away their fears.

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El presidente de Estados Unidos, Donald Trump, aseguró este martes que Israel ha aceptado los términos de una propuesta de alto el fuego de 60 días en Gaza e instó instado a Hamás a que se avenga a esas condiciones. El republicano ha anunciado este preacuerdo cuando se prepara para recibir al primer ministro israelí, Benjamín Netanyahu, el próximo lunes en la Casa Blanca.

Ni el Gobierno de Israel ni Hamás se han pronunciado al respecto, ni tampoco han confirmado la promesa de ese alto el fuego.

El presidente de Estados Unidos ha recurrido una vez más a su política de de hechos consumados al hacer un anuncio que llega tras días de mensajes cruzados. Su objetivo es que las partes negocien un alto el fuego, alcancen una nueva propuesta para intercambiar rehenes y pongan fin a la guerra.

“Mis representantes tuvieron hoy una reunión larga y productiva con los israelíes sobre Gaza. Israel aceptó las condiciones necesarias para alcanzar el ALTO EL FUEGO de 60 días, tiempo durante el cual trabajaremos con todas las partes para poner fin a la guerra”, escribió Trump en un mensaje en su plataforma, Truth Social, que cogió, com ya es costumbre, a casi todos por sorpresa.

El presidente también agregó que los mediadores cataríes y egipcios serán los encargados de presentar la propuesta final. “Espero, por el bien de Oriente Próximo, que Hamás acepte este acuerdo”, continúa el mensaje en Truth. Incluso antes de que Israel pulverizara en marzo el alto el fuego más largo de la guerra, de casi dos meses, Trump exigió en repetidas ocasiones a Hamás que aceptara treguas más largas.

La presencia de Ron Dermer, negociador jefe israelí, en Washington a lo largo de esta semana, prevista con el propósito de preparar la visita de Netanyahu, será clave también para la concreción de estas negociaciones. El lunes, el ministro de Exteriores del Estado judío aseguró que su Gobierno mantenía “la firme intención de alcanzar un acuerdo sobre los rehenes y un alto el fuego en Gaza”.

Respaldo de Europa

El principal obstáculo era en ese momento la negativa a aceptar las condiciones planteadas hasta ese momento por Hamás, que incluían que la liberación de rehenes coincidiera con el fin de los ataques israelíes y la salida de Gaza de sus tropas. “Hemos dado el ‘sí’ a las propuestas del enviado especial Steve Witkoff [negociador jefe de Estados Unidos y enviado especial de Trump a Oriente Próximo]. Pero, lamentablemente, hasta este momento, Hamás no lo ha hecho. Ahora es crucial que Europa respalde la iniciativa estadounidense de alto el fuego y destruya las ilusiones de Hamás”, añadió el canciller israelí, Gideon Saar.

Trump indicó el viernes pasado a las preguntas de los periodistas que confiaba en la proximidad de un acuerdo de alto el fuego. “Estamos trabajando en Gaza y tratando de resolver el problema”, declaró.

El anuncio de este martes llegó poco después de que Israel ordenara evacuaciones en el norte de Gaza en previsión de sus planes de intensificar sus operaciones militares. Al menos 22 palestinos murieron en un ataque aéreo israelí contra un café frente al mar en la ciudad de Gaza el lunes. Al final de la jornada, entre las más cruentas de las últimas semanas, el saldo de muertos entre ese y otros ataques ascendía a más de 60 personas

La brutal ofensiva de Israel en Gaza ha provocado la muerte de más de 56 000 personas y ha creado una crisis humanitaria, al dejar a los gazatíes sin acceso a recursos esenciales para la supervivencia.

Aproximadamente 50 de los 251 rehenes están todavía en Gaza tras los ataques de Hamás contra Israel el 7 de octubre de 2023, en los que murieron más de 1200 personas. De los rehenes que permanecen en cautiverio, se calcula que 28 están muertos.