Supermarkets across northern Tehran ran out of bread, eggs, water, and milk within hours of the US-Israeli strikes. Queues from petrol stations stretched into surrounding residential streets. Iran produces roughly 90 per cent of its own wheat, but the distribution network — refineries, bakeries, trucking — depends on fuel, electricity, and functioning road infrastructure, all disrupted simultaneously by the bombardment.
The shortages strip away the simplified broadcast picture — celebrations on one channel, mourning on another. The IRGC's Strait of Hormuz closure, which froze commercial shipping through a waterway carrying roughly 20 per cent of the world's traded oil, was aimed at Western economies. But Iran's own refined fuel imports and food logistics run through the same corridors. Karaj, struck in the opening wave of Operation Epic Fury , is Tehran's western industrial corridor and a primary distribution hub for the capital's food supply.
Iran's economy was already broken before the first bomb fell. The rial's collapse and the economic disintegration that drove the largest protests since 1979 had eroded purchasing power for months. The strikes have converted a slow-moving economic crisis into an acute humanitarian one. A population that could afford less and less now has nothing to buy.
Tehran Province holds roughly 14 million people. The National Security Council has advised them to leave. No functioning evacuation plan exists, and the roads out pass through territory also under bombardment. For those who cannot leave — the elderly, the poor, families with young children — the immediate threat is not another airstrike. It is that the city's supply chains have stopped.
