After the Cease-Fire, Iranians Deal With the War’s Lasting Impact

Hours after the United States and Iran agreed to a cease-fire — pausing the immediate threat of airstrikes that Iranians had lived with for nearly six weeks — residents of Tehran and cities across the country described a confusing brew of emotions: relief, shock, and a deep foreboding about what their government might do next. The pause brought an end to what many described as weeks of psychological torment, with nighttime explosions shaking homes, internet shutdowns severing contact with the outside world, and armed militia checkpoints appearing on city streets. Yet for many, the cessation of bombs did not feel like liberation — it felt, as one physician described it, like being “left on their own, facing a repressive regime alone.”

The human toll of nearly six weeks of conflict extended well beyond the physical. Iranians described an economy in freefall: schools, hospitals, homes, bridges, and roads destroyed, along with major industrial employers that had fueled domestic commerce. Prices for everyday goods were reported to have risen sharply, and Maryam, the Tehran bank employee, recounted a shopkeeper warning her to stock up on canned food before prices climbed a further 40 percent. Sleeping pills and anxiety medication had become difficult to obtain, according to Mehrshad, the Tehran businessman, who said in a late-March interview that “psychologically, many are in a very dark place.”

The economic damage was compounded by the internet shutdown that the government maintained throughout the war, which forced residents to spend hours each day — and significant funds — trying to circumvent restrictions in order to reach family members and access information. One man in his twenties described his recent daily routine: struggling for hours to find an internet connection, being stopped at street checkpoints where his car, phone, and personal belongings were searched, and being woken at night by explosions strong enough to shake his entire home. The degradation of daily life, he said, had been total.

For many Iranians opposed to the government, the cease-fire brought a new and more immediate anxiety: the prospect of the Islamic Republic reasserting its domestic authority now that the external military pressure had eased. In the days leading up to the truce, the government had carried out a string of executions of people arrested during the January protest wave. A prominent human rights lawyer was detained the week before the cease-fire. Dozens of others were arrested, some specifically for having transmitted information to foreign media outlets. Several Iranians reached on Wednesday said they feared that in the weeks and months ahead, the government would flex its power at home to reassert control.

Mehrshad described an “atmosphere of fear” created by militia checkpoints and the nightly pro-government street gatherings. He and two other Iranians interpreted those demonstrations as a deliberate show of force, designed to discourage people from using the wartime disruption to renew the street protests that had mobilized large crowds just three months earlier. Iraj, for his part, acknowledged that popular grievances had not disappeared. “We still don’t have proper mechanisms for protest, and there are many dissatisfied people,” he said, warning that discontent would pile up again in the absence of substantive government action.

The political fault lines running through Iranian society were sharply visible in the reactions to the cease-fire. Iranians opposed to the government said they were dismayed that the Islamic Republic had survived, despite the deaths of senior leaders during the conflict and earlier statements from U.S. and Israeli officials suggesting they wanted sweeping political change in Iran. In the weeks before the bombing began, some had expressed hope — or resignation — that foreign intervention might lead to the toppling of the regime. That hope had not materialized, and for many it had curdled into something darker.

Yet not all Iranians had wanted the government to fall by foreign hand. Iraj, who said he had never liked the United States and Israel, maintained those feelings even after the war. “I hope other people also come to understand that they are not saviors,” he said. Mohammad, who implied his unhappiness with the cease-fire stemmed from the government’s survival, nonetheless acknowledged the limits of his own position: “I didn’t want the war to reach a stage where it would seriously harm all of our lives,” he said. Mostafa, the I.T. engineer in Rasht, suggested the government would use public funds to rebuild its missile arsenal — a sign, in his view, that the underlying dynamics had not changed.

For residents of areas that bore the brunt of daily bombardment, the cease-fire brought more tangible relief. Mostafa said those in heavily bombed areas were glad the strikes had stopped and relieved that threats to cut water, electricity, and gas — which President Trump had directed toward Iranian infrastructure — had not been carried out, at least not yet. Mojtaba, the physician in the northeast, observed that people in his region were “very worried about the future and have less hope for change compared to before the war started.” The cease-fire had not resolved the underlying situation; it had merely paused it.

The psychological damage was extensive. Mehrshad described Tehran residents as suffering “beyond words.” A young man in his twenties described months spent watching his country deteriorate, first through the January protests, then through the gathering threat of war, then through the war itself. He had once supported the idea of foreign military intervention, motivated, he said, by desperation. He had recently concluded that the war had gotten out of control. With the cease-fire in place, he said he planned to use whatever stability it might bring to make arrangements to leave Iran — and, he added, he intended never to look back.

The cease-fire between the United States and Iran offered a pause, not a resolution — and for millions of Iranians, it arrived laden with the weight of what had already been lost and the fear of what might yet come. The government that had survived the conflict appeared, by several accounts, to be consolidating its hold rather than loosening it, pursuing a campaign of arrests and executions even as bombs fell. The economy lay in ruins, public trust in the possibility of change had eroded further, and a generation of Iranians was left to contemplate a future in a country many felt had been irreparably altered — unsure whether the quiet that had descended was the beginning of something better or merely the prelude to the next crisis.