The War Of Narrative: The Case of Iran
Irfana Hashimi & Becky Overmyer
-Velazquez | GUEST COMMENTATORS
April 09, 2026
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On Feb. 28, 2026, the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran without provocation. In the aftermath, much of the mainstream coverage framed events around Iranian State repression while narrowing the broader geopolitical context, thereby distorting public understanding of how and why this aggression unfolded.
Contested casualty figures during protests in Iran between Dec. 2025 and Feb. 2026 are central to this narrative. The Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRA), a U.S. based NGO, documented approximately 7,000 deaths, while the Iranian government reported a much lower count of 3,117. Much higher numbers, ranging from 32,000 to 45,000, have circulated in political rhetoric but remain unverified.
Moreover, questions remain regarding responsibility for these deaths, given that Israeli and American sources, including President Trump most recently, admitted to arming and inciting rioters inside Iran.
Despite uncertainty, these figures have circulated widely in U.S. media, while allegations of foreign intelligence involvement have been sidelined, reinforcing a one sided narrative that shapes public perception.
Representations of Iranian State violence form part of a broader war of narratives, in which partial reporting and unverified claims actively legitimize U.S. and Israeli calls for military action and manufacture consent for war.
Following the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, media coverage of certain alleged atrocities committed by Hamas and other Palestinian actors circulated quickly, often before verification.
Among the most widely disseminated claims were reports that came to be called the Hamas baby-beheading hoax, repeated across Western media outlets and by political leaders, including former U.S. President Joe Biden, before eventually being recognized as false. Reuters, AP, and BBC found no evidence to support claims of babies being beheaded.
Yet, these claims proved integral to building international support for Israel’s military response in Gaza, now widely recognized as the Palestinian genocide by scholars, human rights advocates, experts, international bodies, and states.
The speed and scale at which such claims spread demonstrate how unverified information can shape public perception and justify large-scale violence.
For this reason, it is crucial to critically examine how mainstream news frames the Israeli-U.S. war with Iran. An honest discussion must situate this war within the broader geopolitical context, including the Palestinian genocide and Israel’s broader ambitions of regional expansion, increasingly described as the Greater Israel Project.
The Greater Israel Project is a Zionist plan to give Israel more control over the West Bank and nearby countries like Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt.
On Aug. 25, 2025, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed deep attachment to the vision of the Promised Land and Greater Israel, a vision consistent with the historical ideology of the Likud Party and its Revisionist Zionist roots. Whether or not one accepts this view, it remains relevant to the current war in Iran.
Equally important, mainstream U.S. coverage has largely overlooked concerns that Israel is exporting the Gaza model of warfare to neighboring countries.
On March 24, Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz announced plans to extend operations in the south of Lebanon up to the Litani River, approximately 20 miles north of Israel’s border (roughly 10 percent of Lebanon), while referencing the “Rafah and Bayt Hanun model” used in Gaza.
In early April, the Israeli military advanced deeper into Lebanese territory, ordering residents to evacuate and move north of the Zahrani River (an expansion reaching roughly 13–20 percent of Lebanon). These actions demonstrate that Israel’s military strategies, first deployed in Gaza, are now exd across the region as part of a broader strategy.
According to the U.S. military, over 1,000 targets were struck in Iran within the first 24 hours of the aggression. The strike on a school in Minab, southern Iran, an attack that killed 165–175 adults and children, most of them girls between the ages of seven and twelve, has been presented as an intelligence failure.
However, witnesses and medics describe the Minab strike as a “double-tap” attack: first, targeting the school, and then a prayer hall where children had gathered while waiting for their parents and first responders.
While investigations are ongoing, this account raises serious concerns under international humanitarian law and could constitute a war crime. This massacre occurring on the first day of the war is no coincidence; it follows the Israeli targeting of children in Gaza for maximum terror, a method well documented by doctors during the Palestinian genocide.
Regime change has long been a recurring feature of U.S. imperial policy. For decades, the U.S. and its allies sought to destabilize Iran to control its natural resources and strategic position. From the CIA-engineered coup in 1953 that overthrew democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh following his nationalization of Iran’s oil industry to U.S. support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), even as Iraq deployed chemical weapons, to more than 40 years of crippling sanctions imposed on the Iranian people, the U.S. has consistently acted as the aggressor, actively shaping and destabilizing Iran’s modern trajectory.
This record extends beyond Iran. It includes the illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. involvement in Syria through programs such as Timber Sycamore, widely criticized for arming groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda, the NATO-led intervention in Libya, targeted assassinations of Iranian officials, and U.S. attacks on Iran during formal negotiations. Taken together, these actions point to the U.S. as the central destabilizing force in the region.
A growing number of Americans now view the Israeli-U.S. aggression against Iran as Israel’s war. On March 5, Netanyahu himself stated, “This joint war allows us to do what I have hoped to achieve for 40 years: to completely crush the regime of terror.” Such statements reinforce the perception that the U.S. is waging a war of choice, one that does not have the support of most Americans and aligns closely with Israel’s long-term agenda.
For years, Americans have been conditioned to view Iran as one of the most dangerous states in the world, but Iran is not a errorist state by any stretch of the imagination. In addition, the claim that Israel is responding to threats against its security, rather than actively shaping and escalating the conflict, distorts the role of Israel as a primary driver of this war.
See, for example, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s assertion that the U.S. struck Iran because of an anticipated Israeli action: “If we stood and waited for that attack to come first before we hit them, we would suffer much higher casualties [. . .] We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action; we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces.”
The cruel irony is that U.S. and Israeli racist hubris blinded the leaders of both countries to Iran’s decades-long preparation for an asymmetrical war of attrition. The illegal assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei further galvanized Iranians and Shia across the region to resist aggression at any cost, because they understand that this is a war for the very existence of Iran, a center of Shia Islam, and the only power standing in the way of Israeli expansion.
Predictably, the U.S. and Israel not only face the unrelenting Iranian missile and drone barrages, but also coordinated attacks from Iranian allies in Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon, with China and Russia providing behind-the-scenes economic and satellite support to Iran. Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, directly impacting the global economy in ways foreseen by experts years ago.
The world is changing, and it will undoubtedly be different once this war concludes. As teachers and scholars, it is our responsibility to move beyond the propaganda masquerading as news to critically understand and explain the complex historical, political, and social contexts of these events and their consequences for all our lives.