By Uzma Ehtasham
After Israeli‑led air strikes hit Iran’s nuclear‑enrichment infrastructure, Tehran has retaliated with missile barrages targeting the southern Israeli cities of Arad, Dimona and other central districts, marking a dangerous shift from regional posturing to direct confrontation. Reports indicate Iran has launched multiple waves of missiles at Dimona over the past 24 hours, laying bare deep damage to buildings and infrastructure in a town that also hosts Israel’s guarded nuclear‑research complex. The Iranian media frames these strikes as a measured response to the earlier assault on its enrichment site, but the choice of target—Dimona—has turned a tit‑for‑tat exchange into a perilous flirtation with nuclear escalation.
In Arad, Iranian projectiles have reportedly killed at least half a dozen people and wounded more than a hundred, reducing several blocks to rubble and leaving at least 20 structures badly damaged. Iranian outlets claim their missiles carried cluster‑type warheads, although Israeli military assessments so far describe heavy conventional payloads rather than cluster munitions. The inability of Israel’s advanced missile‑defence systems to fully intercept the incoming fire in the Dimona area has exposed the limits of even sophisticated air‑defence shields when confronted with a barrage of sophisticated warheads. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have claimed 200 Israeli fatalities, yet Israel has neither confirmed nor denied such a high toll, underscoring the fog of war that now shrouds the region.
The crisis has spilled beyond the Levant. Iran has also targeted a U.S. facility near Baghdad airport, though there is as yet no verified report of casualties or major damage. Donald Trump, re‑elected U.S. president, has issued a stark ultimatum, warning that if the Strait of Hormuz is not fully reopened within 48 hours, American forces will strike Iranian power plants, a threat that only deepens the specter of a wider energy‑and‑infrastructure war. Meanwhile, Iran’s military spokespersons have countered by pledging to hit not only American and Israeli assets but also oil and gas infrastructure, desalination plants and even U.S. oil‑reserve information‑technology systems, turning every pipeline and port into potential flashpoints.
Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has sought to carve out a diplomatic channel, addressing Muslim and neighboring states with a message that Tehran bears them no ill will and that current tensions are rooted in Israeli designs to divide the region. These assurances are echoed by Iran’s supreme leader, who insists that strikes attributed to Iran on Turkey or Oman are part of an Israeli‑orchestrated narrative. In Tehran’s telling, Iran is cast as a defensive actor, responding to aggression rather than fomenting it. Yet, the contrast between these soothing statements and the scale, precision and symbolism of the missile strikes—particularly against Dimona—paints a picture of a regime maneuvering on the brink of outright nuclear‑threshold warfare.
The gravest risk lies precisely in that threshold. Israel possesses undeclared but widely understood nuclear capabilities, while Iran has long been under suspicion of nurturing a covert bomb program. Each side now claims the moral high ground as victim and punisher, yet the cadence of strikes and counter‑strikes brings the conflict closer to a miscalculation that could trigger the use of nuclear weapons. The repercussions would not be confined to the Middle East; global markets, energy routes and food‑supply chains would shudder under a shock wave of scarce oil, soaring prices and paralyzed trade routes.
From a humanitarian vantage, the calculus is even starker. War rarely solves disputes; it merely manufactures new tragedies on a larger scale. Hospitals, schools and power grids are collateral, and the scars of conflict linger for generations. If this spiral of escalation hardens into a full‑blown regional war, the specter of widespread famine, displacement and economic collapse looms over entire continents. The moral imperative, then, is not to choose sides, but to defuse the crisis before it metastasizes beyond control.
For countries such as Pakistan, the moment demands a principled, balanced stance. It is not enough merely to call for peace from the sidelines; Islamabad must push for dialogue within the OIC and among Muslim‑majority states, urging them to resist the temptation of becoming proxies in a Western‑Iranian tug‑of‑war. Regional unity, rather than sectarian or ideological cleavage, offers the slim hope of isolating the most belligerent actors and bolstering quiet diplomacy. The alternative is global complicity in a catastrophe whose contours are already visible on the horizon.
This is more than a regional crisis; it is a test of whether the current international order, with its institutions, vetoes and alliances, can survive its own contradictions. If the United States and Israel continue to escalate against Iran while the Islamic Republic responds with ever‑more provocative strikes, the world may find itself hurtling into a catastrophe that no one claims to want—but no one has yet the courage decisively to prevent. History will not excuse the passivity of the powerful while the planet trembled on the edge of nuclear chaos.
(The writer is a public health professional, journalist, and possesses expertise in health communication, having keen interest in national and international affairs, can be reached at uzma@metro-morning.com)
