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NEW YORK: The streets of Tehran are empty, businesses closed, communications patchy at best. With no bona fide bomb shelters open to the public, panicked masses spend restless nights on the floors of metro stations as strikes boom overhead.

This is Iran’s capital city, just under a week into a fierce Israeli blitz to destroy the country’s nuclear program and its military capabilities. After knocking out much of Iran’s air defense system, Israel says its warplanes have free rein over the city’s skies. US President Donald Trump on Monday told Tehran’s roughly 10 million residents to evacuate “immediately.”

Thousands have fled, spending hours in gridlock as they head toward the suburbs, the Caspian Sea, or even Armenia or Türkiye. But others — those elderly and infirm — are stuck in high-rise apartment buildings. Their relatives fret: what to do?

Israeli strikes on Iran have killed at least 585 people and wounded over 1,300, a human rights group says. Local media, themselves targets of bombardment, have stopped reporting on the attacks, leaving Iranians in the dark. There are few visible signs of state authority: Police appear largely undercover, air raid sirens are unreliable, and there’s scant information on what to do in case of attack.

Shirin, 49, who lives in the southern part of Tehran, said every call or text to friends and family in recent days has felt like it could be the last.

“We don’t know if tomorrow we will be alive,” she said.

Many Iranians feel conflicted. Some support Israel’s targeting of Iranian political and military officials they see as repressive. Others staunchly defend the Islamic Republic and retaliatory strikes on Israel. Then, there are those who oppose Iran’s rulers — but still don’t want to see their country bombed.

To stay, or to go?

The Associated Press interviewed five people in Iran and one Iranian American in the US over the phone. All spoke either on the condition of anonymity or only allowed their first names to be used, for fear of retribution from the state against them or their families.

Most of the calls ended abruptly and within minutes, cutting off conversations as people grew nervous — or because the connection dropped. Iran’s government has acknowledged disrupting Internet access. It says it’s to protect the country, though that has blocked average Iranians from getting information from the outside world.

Iranians in the diaspora wait anxiously for news from relatives. One, an Iranian American human rights researcher in the US, said he last heard from relatives when some were trying to flee Tehran earlier in the week. He believes that lack of gas and traffic prevented them from leaving.

The most heartbreaking interaction, he said, was when his older cousins — with whom he grew up in Iran — told him “we don’t know where to go. If we die, we die.”

“Their sense was just despair,” he said.

Some families have made the decision to split up.

A 23-year-old Afghan refugee who has lived in Iran for four years said he stayed behind in Tehran but sent his wife and newborn son out of the city after a strike Monday hit a nearby pharmacy.

“It was a very bad shock for them,” he said.

Some, like Shirin, said fleeing was not an option. The apartment buildings in Tehran are towering and dense. Her father has Alzheimer’s and needs an ambulance to move. Her mother’s severe arthritis would make even a short trip extremely painful.

Still, hoping escape might be possible, she spent the last several days trying to gather their medications. Her brother waited at a gas station until 3 a.m., only to be turned away when the fuel ran out. As of Monday, gas was being rationed to under 20 liters (5 gallons) per driver at stations across Iran after an Israeli strike set fire to the world’s largest gas field.

Some people, like Arshia, said they are just tired.

“I don’t want to go in traffic for 40 hours, 30 hours, 20 hours, just to get to somewhere that might get bombed eventually,” he said.

The 22-year-old has been staying in the house with his parents since the initial Israeli strike. He said his once-lively neighborhood of Saadat Abad in northwestern Tehran is now a ghost town. Schools are closed. Very few people even step outside to walk their dogs. Most local stores have run out of drinking water and cooking oil. Others closed.

Still, Arshia said the prospect of finding a new place is too daunting.

“We don’t have the resources to leave at the moment,” he said.

Residents are on their own
No air raid sirens went off as Israeli strikes began pounding Tehran before dawn Friday. For many, it was an early sign civilians would have to go it alone.

During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Tehran was a low-slung city, many homes had basements to shelter in, and there were air raid drills and sirens. Now the capital is packed with close-built high-rise apartments without shelters.

“It’s a kind of failing of the past that they didn’t build shelters,” said a 29-year-old Tehran resident who left the city Monday. “Even though we’ve been under the shadow of a war, as long as I can remember.”

Her friend’s boyfriend was killed while going to the store.

“You don’t really expect your boyfriend — or your anyone, really — to leave the house and never return when they just went out for a routine normal shopping trip,” she said.

Those who choose to relocate do so without help from the government. The state has said it is opening mosques, schools and metro stations for use as shelters. Some are closed, others overcrowded.

Hundreds crammed into one Tehran metro station Friday night. Small family groups lay on the floor. One student, a refugee from another country, said she spent 12 hours in the station with her relatives.

“Everyone there was panicking because of the situation,” she said. “Everyone doesn’t know what will happen next, if there is war in the future and what they should do. People think nowhere is safe for them.”

Soon after leaving the station, she saw that Israel had warned a swath of Tehran to evacuate.

“For immigrant communities, this is so hard to live in this kind of situation,” she said, explaining she feels like she has nowhere to escape to — especially not her home country, which she asked not be identified.

Fear of Iran mingles with fear of Israel

For Shirin, the hostilities are bittersweet. Despite being against the theocracy and its treatment of women, the idea that Israel may determine the future does not sit well with her.

“As much as we want the end of this regime, we didn’t want it to come at the hands of a foreign government,” she said. “We would have preferred that if there were to be a change, it would be the result of a people’s movement in Iran.”

Meanwhile, the 29-year-old who left Tehran had an even more basic message for those outside Iran:

“I just want people to remember that whatever is happening here, it’s not routine business for us. People’s lives here — people’s livelihoods — feel as important to them as they feel to anyone in any other place. How would you feel if your city or your country was under bombardment by another country, and people were dying left and right?”

“We are kind of like, this can’t be happening. This can’t be my life.”

SOUTH SUDAN: Swooping low over the banks of a Nile River tributary, an aid flight run by retired American military officers released a stream of food-stuffed sacks over a town emptied by fighting in South Sudan, a country wracked by conflict.

Last week’s air drop was the latest in a controversial development: private contracting firms led by former US intelligence officers and military veterans delivering aid to some of the world’s deadliest conflict zones, in operations organized with governments that are combatants in the conflicts.

The moves are roiling the global aid community, which warns of a more militarized, politicized and profit-seeking trend that could allow governments or combatants to use life-saving aid to control hungry civilian populations and advance war aims.

In South Sudan and Gaza, two for-profit US companies led by American national security veterans are delivering aid in operations backed by the South Sudanese and Israeli governments.

The American contractors say they’re putting their security, logistics and intelligence skills to work in relief operations. Fogbow, the US company that carried out last week’s air drops over South Sudan, says it aims to be a “humanitarian” force.

“We’ve worked for careers, collectively, in conflict zones. And we know how to essentially make very difficult situations work,” said Fogbow President Michael Mulroy, a retired CIA officer and former senior defense official in the first Trump administration, speaking on the airport tarmac in Juba, South Sudan’s capital.

But the UN and many leading non-profit groups say US contracting firms are stepping into aid distribution with little transparency or humanitarian experience, and, crucially, without commitment to humanitarian principles of neutrality and operational independence in war zones.

“What we’ve learned over the years of successes and failures is there’s a difference between a logistics operation and a security operation, and a humanitarian operation,” said Scott Paul, a director at Oxfam America.

“‘Truck and chuck’ doesn’t help people,” Paul said. “It puts people at risk.”

‘We don’t want to replace any entity’

Fogbow took journalists up in a cargo plane to watch their team drop 16 tons of beans, corn and salt for South Sudan’s Upper Nile state town of Nasir.

Residents fled homes there after fighting erupted in March between the government and opposition groups.

Mulroy acknowledged the controversy over Fogbow’s aid drops, which he said were paid for by the South Sudanese government.

But, he maintained: “We don’t want to replace any entity” in aid work.

Shared roots in Gaza and US intelligence

Fogbow was in the spotlight last year for its proposal to use barges to bring aid to Gaza, where Israeli restrictions were blocking overland deliveries. The United States focused instead on a US military effort to land aid via a temporary pier.

Since then, Fogbow has carried out aid drops in Sudan and South Sudan, east African nations where wars have created some of the world’s gravest humanitarian crises.

Fogbow says ex-humanitarian officials are also involved, including former UN World Food Program head David Beasley, who is a senior adviser.

Operating in Gaza, meanwhile, Safe Reach Solutions, led by a former CIA officer and other retired US security officers, has partnered with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a US-backed nonprofit that Israel says is the linchpin of a new aid system to wrest control from the UN, which Israel says has been infiltrated by Hamas, and other humanitarian groups.

Starting in late May, the American-led operation in Gaza has distributed food at fixed sites in southern Gaza, in line with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stated plan to use aid to concentrate the territory’s more than 2 million people in the south, freeing Israel to fight Hamas elsewhere. Aid workers fear it’s a step toward another of Netanyahu’s public goals, removing Palestinians from Gaza in “voluntary” migrations.

Since then, several hundred Palestinians have been killed and hundreds more wounded in near daily shootings as they tried to reach aid sites, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Witnesses say Israeli troops regularly fire heavy barrages toward the crowds in an attempt to control them.

The Israeli military has denied firing on civilians. It says it fired warning shots in several instances, and fired directly at a few “suspects” who ignored warnings and approached its forces.

It’s unclear who is funding the new operation in Gaza. No donor has come forward, and the US says it’s not funding it.

In response to criticism over its Gaza aid deliveries, Safe Reach Solutions said it has former aid workers on its team with “decades of experience in the world’s most complex environments” who bring “expertise to the table, along with logisticians and other experts.”

South Sudan’s people ask: Who’s getting our aid drops?
Last week’s air drop over South Sudan went without incident, despite fighting nearby. A white cross marked the drop zone. Only a few people could be seen. Fogbow contractors said there were more newly returned townspeople on previous drops.

Fogbow acknowledges glitches in mastering aid drops, including one last year in Sudan’s South Kordofan region that ended up with too-thinly-wrapped grain sacks split open on the ground.

After gaining independence from Sudan in 2011, South Sudan has struggled to emerge from a civil war that killed nearly 400,000 people. Rights groups say its government is one of the world’s most corrupt, and until now has invested little in quelling the dire humanitarian crisis.

South Sudan said it engaged Fogbow for air drops partly because of the Trump administration’s deep cuts in US Agency for International Development funding. Humanitarian Minister Albino Akol Atak said the drops will expand to help people in need throughout the country.

But two South Sudanese groups question the government’s motives.

“We don’t want to see a humanitarian space being abused by military actors ... under the cover of a food drop,” said Edmund Yakani, head of the Community Empowerment for Progress Organization, a local civil society group.

Asked about suspicions the aid drops were helping South Sudan’s military aims, Fogbow’s Mulroy said the group has worked with the UN World Food Program to make sure “this aid is going to civilians.”

“If it wasn’t going to civilians, we would hope that we would get that feedback, and we would cease and desist,” Mulroy said.

In a statement, WFP country director Mary-Ellen McGroarty said: “WFP is not involved in the planning, targeting or distribution of food air-dropped” by Fogbow on behalf of South Sudan’s government, citing humanitarian principles.

A ‘business-driven model’

Longtime humanitarian leaders and analysts are troubled by what they see as a teaming up of warring governments and for-profit contractors in aid distribution.

When one side in a conflict decides where and how aid is handed out, and who gets it, “it will always result in some communities getting preferential treatment,” said Jan Egeland, executive director of the Norwegian Refugee Council.

Sometimes, that set-up will advance strategic aims, as with Netanyahu’s plans to move Gaza’s civilians south, Egeland said.

The involvement of soldiers and security workers, he added, can make it too “intimidating” for some in need to even try to get aid.

Until now, Western donors always understood those risks, Egeland said. But pointing to the Trump administration’s backing of the new aid system in Gaza, he asked: “Why does the US ... want to support what they have resisted with every other war zone for two generations?”

Mark Millar, who has advised the UN and Britain on humanitarian matters in South Sudan and elsewhere, said involving private military contractors risks undermining the distinction between humanitarian assistance and armed conflict.

Private military contractors “have even less sympathy for a humanitarian perspective that complicates their business-driven model,” he said. “And once let loose, they seem to be even less accountable.”