When Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced, with the satisfied air of an industrialist surveying demolished competition, that Israeli strikes had destroyed around 70 percent of Iran’s steel production capacity, he was not describing a military achievement. He was boasting about an act of economic destruction: one aimed not at soldiers or weapons systems, but at furnaces, factories, and the accumulated industrial labor of millions of Iranians over decades.
“We have severely damaged Iran’s steel and petrochemical sectors,” Katz said, ordering the military to continue striking what he called “the national infrastructure of the Iranian terror regime.” The framing is deliberate: strikes on a country’s industrial base are presented as strikes on a government, as though the two could be neatly separated. They cannot.
The fates of a government and its people are never entirely separable, and Iran is no exception: the Islamic Republic’s industrial policies, planning institutions, and state investment have all played a real part in building what now exists. But the insistence of Israeli and American officials that these strikes are directed at “the regime” rather than at Iran’s people performs a sleight of hand that cannot go unchallenged.
Whatever role the state played in constructing refineries, pharmaceutical plants, and research institutions, it is Iranian workers, engineers, scientists, and patients who depend on them, who built their careers inside them, and who will suffer most from their destruction. Bombing a country’s industrial and scientific base is an act of violence against its people, regardless of what one thinks of its government.
The petrochemical strikes of late March and early April 2026 were breathtaking in their scope. In the space of a few days, Israeli forces struck the Bandar Imam Petrochemical Complex at Mahshahr in Khuzestan, which Iranian officials described as producing seventy-two million metric tons of…
Auteur: Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi
