July 26, 2025 (NYTimes.com)

By Sahar Delijani

Sahar Delijani is an Iranian American writer in New York City.

The clock in Evin Prison stopped just before noon on June 23. That was the hour Israeli bombs tore through the compound, heavily damaging the health clinic, visitation center, administrative buildings and multiple wards — including the infamous Ward 209, where Evin’s many political prisoners were held. The attack took place amid 12 days of Israeli airstrikes, an unlawful war targeting Iran’s military and nuclear facilities. But Evin is no military site: It is known for holding the regime’s dissenters and critics.

Israeli authorities called the strike on Evin “symbolic”— an attack on a prison that represented “oppression for the Iranian people.” In a social media post, Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Saar suggested it was a strike aimed at liberation. That symbolism did not ring true for the many Iranians killed in the blasts: visiting family members, social workers, medical staffers, teenage conscripts tasked with escorting prisoners and inmates, among them transgender prisoners whose ward was reduced to rubble. Anguished families were left scrambling for news of their loved ones. Prisoners who were already at risk were pushed into deeper peril — relocated to distant prisons, cut off from support and left to endure even harsher conditions under the unrelenting grip of a regime that punishes survival itself.

If there’s anything symbolic in Israel’s bombing of Evin Prison, it is the false and dangerous narrative that wars help those fighting to bring democracy to Iran. Far from weakening the Islamic Republic’s apparatus of repression, Israel’s war has emboldened it, rolling back the fragile gains won through years of homegrown civil defiance. It has sabotaged decades of grass-roots organizing and collective labor by Iran’s civil society, tearing through the very scaffolding of democratic resistance and undermining the only force capable of changing Iran from within: the Iranian people.

I come from a long lineage of resistance to repression and tyranny. I was born in Evin Prison in 1983. My parents were secular leftist activists who fought to overthrow the Shah, and after the 1979 revolution continued their activism against the newly established Islamic Republic. In 1983, when my mother was pregnant with me, she and my father were arrested along with thousands of other political activists. After I was born, I stayed with her for a month before I was taken from her arms and given to my grandparents, who raised me while my parents remained behind bars. They were eventually released after serving yearslong sentences.

My parents’ arrest came during a wave of mass detentions and intimidation targeting the regime’s political opponents. By 1983, as the Iran-Iraq war raged on, the regime used the conflict to justify a sweeping crackdown, framing dissent as treason in times of national crisis. My mother and father’s imprisonment took place amid a ruthless campaign of repression that would culminate in 1988 in the bloodiest political purge in Iran’s post-revolutionary history.

Few things are more dangerous than a dictatorship in panic. The deeper the fear, the more ruthlessly it strikes back. That summer, weakened by eight years of war with Iraq and determined to consolidate power, the Iranian regime launched a campaign of executions against political prisoners it deemed unrepentant. Thousands were killed, their bodies dumped into unmarked mass graves. My uncle Mohsen was among them. The 1988 massacre remains seared into the collective memory of Iranians, an open wound in the nation’s conscience.

Today a similar cycle of violence is at risk of repeating. The once abstract threat of foreign invasion, long invoked to justify crackdowns, became real, giving the regime cover to escalate repression in the name of security. Now a familiar purge is underway in Iran. Dissidents, activists, journalists, writers, minority leaders, community organizers and protesters of the 2022-23 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising are facing a renewed crackdown by authorities. Many face execution, accused of “espionage” for Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Afghan residents were deported in days. Ordinary people live in fear of an ever-deepening oppression.

The Woman, Life, Freedom movement in particular — born out of outrage at the death in police custody of a young Kurdish woman, Jina Mahsa Amini, arrested for allegedly wearing her mandatory hijab improperly — was one of the largest pro-democracy revolts in Iran’s post-revolutionary history. The uprising struck at the very core of the regime’s patriarchal, authoritarian and theocratic foundations, initiating a profound shift in society. Now it is precisely these brave women and men who face persecution as the Islamic Republic moves to reclaim control.

The harrowing aftermath of the Evin Prison bombing mirrors what has unfolded across Iran since Israel’s attacks. According to testimonies from political prisoners inside Evin, Iranian security forces stormed the prison just hours after the airstrikes — not to offer aid or protection to prisoners fearing further strikes but to turn their guns on them, aiming at terrified inmates’ heads and chests as they forced them back into blown-out cells. The prisoners were then chained together, shackled at hand and foot and marched at gunpoint through the wreckage and, darkness, past corpses in body bags, before they finally reached buses bound for other prisons.

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The injustice of these cruel acts is twofold for Iranians: It’s not just that the oppressive regime is carrying them out, it’s also that the bombs of “liberation” were dropped by Israel, a country that has committed unspeakable violence for the last 22 months in Gaza, killing and starving Palestinians.

Israel’s assault has shattered something deep within the Iranian people, sparking a realization that decades of fragile gains in the civil rights struggle could be set back in a few days, that outside forces could bomb their way into their lives and homes with no accountability. With chilling clarity, we witnessed how swiftly our generational fight for democracy could be cast aside as futile and insignificant, too slow for warmongering powers that trade in conquest, not change and justice. In this moment, we see how alone we truly are in our fight for a better life.

Two prominent political prisoners, Mehdi Mahmoudian and Abolfazl Ghadyani, captured the stark reality of the aftermath of the war in a letter they wrote from Evin Prison: “On one side, Iran was under attack by Netanyahu’s government, which has been accused of ‘war crimes’ by the International Criminal Court. On the other, the Islamic Republic — also accused of ‘crimes against humanity’ by U.N. legal experts for its suppression of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement — kept prisoners behind bars under wartime conditions.”

As the dust from the Israeli airstrikes settles and the ruins of Evin are laid bare, the picture is now clear: Iranians are still caught between a ruthless regime that extinguishes life under the hollow claim of protecting a revolution and foreign powers that drop missiles on innocent people under the treacherous guise of liberation.

Sahar Delijani is an Iranian American writer in New York City. She is the author of the novel “Children of the Jacaranda Tree” and several essays and short stories.

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(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)