What Iranians Lost When Israel Bombed Its Most Notorious Prison

New York Times

a day ago

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.
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