Rahim Khorami, left, and Shala Araghianfar, in the room where their son Amirali was killed in an Israeli strike.

By Declan Walsh and Nanna Heitmann who spent a week reporting from Tehran

The New York Times

The professor had a faint air of mystery about him.

A bodyguard trailed behind as the academic came and went from his apartment on a tree-lined street in central Tehran, neighbors said. A taciturn man with a tight gray beard; nobody was quite sure why he needed protection. Everyone knew better than to ask.

Little of that concerned Amirali Khorami, the teenager who lived next door. Obsessed with video games and soccer, Amirali, 14, dreamed of becoming a professional goalkeeper, his family said. He hardly noticed the elderly neighbor who sometimes exchanged pleasantries with his father on the street.

Then, on June 13, in the early hours of the 12-day war between Israel and Iran that later drew in the United States, their fates were inextricably joined. An Israeli bomb crashed into the home of the professor, Dr. Ahmadreza Zolfaghari, who, it turned out, was one of Iran’s leading nuclear scientists.

Not only did the blast kill the scientist and his family, it also tore into surrounding buildings, smashing through wall after wall until it reached the cramped bedroom where Amirali was sleeping and killed him too.

Zahra Ghaderi, 16, was hit by shrapnel when a bomb landed near her home in Tehran on the second day of the war. Six weeks later, she received doses of morphine every two hours to control the pain. “I still have nightmares,” she said.

Rescuers took an hour to pull Amirali’s crushed body from the debris, his 21-year-old brother, Amirmohammad, told me as he stood in the wreckage of their bedroom, nearly two months after the strike.

Granted rare journalist visas, we were in Iran for eight days to gauge the aftermath of the country’s most devastating war in decades. Although the government supplied our translator, whose work we verified, and fear of the authorities is pervasive, many people spoke with surprising candor.

Amirmohammad pointed to a dust-smeared Spider-Man figure poking from the rubble. “Amirali loved life,” he said. “What did he do to deserve death?”

Hundreds of civilians died in June, when Israeli bombs and missiles rained down for 12 days across Tehran, a sprawling city of 10 million people, leaving it bloodied and reeling. American bombers pounded key nuclear facilities to the south. But it was the strikes on the capital that registered the deepest shock among many Iranians, signaling that their country’s old rivalry with Israel had entered a volatile and dangerous new phase.

Israel sought to cripple Iran’s nuclear program and weaken its leadership in the region at a pivotal moment, when Iranian proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah had been badly weakened. Fighter jets and drones pounded military command centers and other targets, wiping out Iran’s top military command as well as at least 13 nuclear scientists.

But the bombs also struck a crowded prison, a TV station broadcasting the news, and apartments filled with sleeping families. Even commuters were not safe: bombs that fell on rush-hour traffic tossed vehicles into the air like toys, video footage showed >>>