Politics

Death Toll Rises as War With Iran Escalates. A Look at What Happened and What Comes Next

An effort in the U.S. Senate to curb President Donald Trump’s war on Iran failed Wednesday on a mostly party-line, 47-53 vote.

Republicans voted down legislation that would have halted Trump’s ability to authorize air strikes on Iran by granting lawmakers the ability to demand congressional approval prior to future attacks.

The move came after days of joint strikes with Israel, without congressional authorization.

The White House on Wednesday said ground troops are not currently under consideration, but officials would not rule them out. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the U.S. is winning decisively and intends to control Iranian airspace.

The U.S. and Israel launched the war Saturday, targeting Iran’s leadership, missile arsenal and nuclear program while suggesting that toppling the government is a goal. But the exact aims and timelines have repeatedly shifted, signaling an open-ended conflict.

The tempo of the strikes on Iran has been so intense that state television announced the mourning ceremony for Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed at the start of the conflict, would be postponed. Millions attended the funeral of his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1989.

Trump praised the U.S. military Wednesday for “doing very well on the war front, to put it mildly.”

Israel also traded fire with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon, while Iran fired on Bahrain, Kuwait and Israel. As the conflict spiraled, Turkey said NATO defenses intercepted a ballistic missile launched from Iran before it entered Turkey’s airspace.

Parallels to Gaza

One human rights group said the civilian death toll in Iran now stands at more than 1,000 lives. The war has also killed more than more than 70 in Lebanon and around a dozen in Israel, according to officials in those countries.

It has disrupted the supply of the world’s oil and gas, snarled international shipping and stranded hundreds of thousands of travelers in the Middle East due to airport lockdowns in the region.

Ibrahim Abusharif, a professor of journalism and Middle Eastern studies at Northwestern University, is one of the travelers stuck as a result of the war.

On Saturday, Abusharif was unaware of the bombings until he landed in Jordan for a connecting flight from Chicago to Doha. It wasn’t until he landed that he first heard about the bombings in Iran.

The more that Abusharif learned about the air strikes, the more he saw parallels with Israel’s bombing of Gaza.

“I think, from the playbook of the military strategies or the terror strategies of the Israeli military in Gaza, hospitals were targeted,” Abusharif said. “They were accused of being dens of Hamas fighters, and that turned out to be false. Schools were obliterated.”

Abusharif referenced the bombing of a school in Iran, where between 100 and 180 girls were killed, in addition to a hospital that was also damaged in the bombings.

The United Nations education agency called the school bombing “a grave violation of the protection afforded to schools under international humanitarian law,” TIME Magazine reported.

“What we’re seeing in Iran is coming close to the same playbook,” Abusharif said. “You want to demoralize the people. You kill their children. You go after their schools. You go after their health facilities. None of them, not the schools or health facilities, has any military strategic benefit. It is there to terrorize the people so they can somehow uprise against the government, and we’re not really seeing much of that, the uprising that people imagined, just like in Iraq, the same failure, right?”

Richard Porter, an attorney and longtime member of the Republican National Committee who served as a White House advisor to President George H.W. Bush, also drew comparisons to Gaza when discussing the bombing of the Iranian school. Porter said Iranians could be mimicking a Hamas tactic, hiding government leaders in hospitals.

Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and author of “Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War,” said he also saw parallels with Israel’s strategy in Gaza.

“Let me please come in and talk about the actual strategic lesson from Gaza, which is there are only 2 million people in Gaza, Palestinians, and in two and a half years, with an enormous amount of air power, an enormous ground army, Israel cannot defeat the Hamas regime, just to be clear,” Pape said. “Now we are going without that ground force and only with air power against Iran, which has 92 million people. Think about that for a moment, and we are talking about — are we really going to try to recreate Gaza in this situation here? I think this is a delusion.”

‘How Do We Protect Civilians?’

Jacqueline Saper, an Iranian American activist and author of “From Miniskirt to Hijab: A Girl in Revolutionary Iran,” said “we need to be careful about drawing comparisons between different conflicts.”

Her biggest priority is to protect civilians from future bombings, though she remained skeptical of why the girls’ school was next to an Iranian base.

“The real question should be: How do we protect civilians and prevent further loss of life while this conflict unfolds?” Saper said. “The school was located next to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base where they store ballistic missiles, launch systems or drone units. Ali Larijani, a former Parliament speaker, is currently managing the country’s response to intense military conflicts with Israel and the U.S. The hypocrisy is that his daughter lives in the U.S., and two nephews in Britain and Canada.”

Saper lived in Iran as a teenager during the revolution of 1979. She recalled the sight of bombings and how distressing that was. She said a similar feeling arose when she learned an airport where her parents formerly worked had been bombed.

For the Iranian people, Saper is holding out hope they will still find justice after mass protests erupted against the Iranian government prior to the current conflict.

Though many factors play into the protests across Iran, one of the largest reasons is Iranian people’s discontent during an economic crisis where inflation has raised the price of day-to-day necessities. Another big factor, Saper said, is opposition to what she described as brutal forms of state repression against Iranian civilians at the hand of the government.

“Living through the Iranian Revolution and in the Islamic Republic for eight years,” Saper said, “I watched how quickly a modern life can be narrowed into obedience. But this new generation is defiant. Real change in Iran will ultimately have to come from the Iranian people themselves. And right now, they are standing in the middle of history, not yet knowing which direction it will turn.”

Saper said she sees hope in Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last shah, who she said has garnered support from the Iranian diaspora as a potential peaceful leader to push for unity in the country during a chaotic time of regime collapse.

Though the future of Iranian leadership remains uncertain, Porter believes there is an exit strategy in sight.

“The exit strategy is actually blow up all of their launchers and their missiles,” Porter said. “I mean, you’ve already seen the degradation of their retaliatory ability. They were down 23% just from yesterday, and they’re down like 80% since the first day in terms of number of missiles they’re putting up. We’ve been able to blow up a lot of their missiles and destroy their launchers. Our base case mission in this attack is to eliminate their ability to attack other countries in the region and to dismantle their terror regime from the air by blowing stuff up.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

---