Israel is not just going after Iran’s military; it is deliberately torching the fuel that keeps ordinary Iranians’ cars moving, homes heated, and factories running, betting that economic agony will crack the regime faster than missiles alone. But history suggests that when outside powers choke a country’s basic lifelines, publics often close ranks around even deeply unpopular leaders rather than risk national humiliation.
Striking the Pumps That Keep Daily Life Going
According to reporting from axios.com, Israel’s latest wave of strikes hit around 30 fuel depots in and around Tehran and the Alborz province, a dramatic escalation from earlier raids focused on missile sites and command hubs. The New York Times has detailed how these depots sit at the heart of Iran’s civilian economy, feeding petrol stations, trucking routes, and local industry rather than just elite military convoys. NPR accounts describe columns of fire and thick black smoke over Tehran, with residents talking about toxic rain and ash as fuel tanks burned for hours.
Israeli officials have framed the depots as dual-use infrastructure that indirectly powers Iran’s missile salvos and drone launches, arguing that hitting them shortens the war by starving the military of fuel. Yet that justification does not change the lived reality that the people who immediately feel the pain are taxi drivers, small business owners, and families already battered by years of sanctions and inflation. When the line at the pump stretches for blocks or fuel simply runs out, the person an average Iranian blames is often the foreign jet that dropped the bomb, not a distant Revolutionary Guard planner.
When Economic Pain Strengthens, Not Weakens, Authoritarian Rule
Political scientists have spent decades documenting how broad economic punishment can entrench authoritarian regimes instead of toppling them. Foreign Policy has written extensively on how sweeping US sanctions left Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro more secure, not less, by hollowing out civil society and giving him a permanent foreign villain to blame. Academic research on sanctions, cited by journals like the International Review of the Red Cross and Columbia-linked policy reviews, shows a consistent ‘rally-around-the-flag’ effect when outside powers are perceived to be punishing entire populations.
The same dynamic has appeared in Russia after infrastructure attacks and sanctions tied to the war in Ukraine, where ICRC-linked analysis of energy-grid strikes notes that civilians bear cascading costs in heating, medical care, and food supply while state narratives frame hardship as patriotic sacrifice. By lighting up Iran’s fuel network, Israel risks giving Tehran’s hard-liners a similar story to tell: that shortages are proof of national victimhood, not of regime mismanagement. That, in turn, can sap the appetite for protest and make already-fragmented opposition groups look dangerously aligned with foreign enemies.
The US Knows the Risks—But Has Limited Leverage
Axios.com reports that senior US officials are privately alarmed by the focus on civilian fuel infrastructure, worrying that it undercuts Washington’s stated goal of weakening Iran’s leadership without permanently alienating its people. The Guardian has highlighted expert warnings that campaigns aimed at erasing nuclear and military capabilities can backfire, pushing regimes to accelerate exactly the programs the strikes were meant to stop. Analysts quoted by CNN note that while Washington can complain behind closed doors, its leverage over Israel’s target list is sharply limited once a joint war is underway.
This is why the emphasis on depots that feed the civilian grid is so strategically risky. Rather than isolating the Revolutionary Guard, the strikes risk knitting security elites, business networks, and ordinary consumers into a single defensive coalition against what can be sold domestically as Western economic warfare by other means. If Iran’s leadership can claim that foreign jets are the reason children cannot get to school or food prices spike again, the opposition’s space to argue that the real problem is corruption and repression narrows dramatically.
Israel Is Betting on Short-Term Shock Over Long-Term Politics
From Jerusalem’s perspective, outlined in regional analysis from outlets such as Al-Monitor and Jane’s, the logic is brutally simple: fuel drives trucks; trucks move missiles and men; destroying storage and distribution sites therefore shortens the conflict window and raises the price of continued confrontation for Tehran. Israeli officials and sympathetic commentators point out that Iran has used its own energy leverage against neighbors and global markets, targeting Gulf shipping and gas pipelines as tools of pressure.
But that logic discounts the politics on the other side of the border. As the Christian Science Monitor and other regional observers have stressed, Iran’s leadership has already weathered waves of protests over economic collapse and repression, only to reassert control through calibrated coercion and nationalist messaging. A strategy that assumes ‘more pain equals less regime’ misunderstands how practiced Tehran is at redirecting anger outward. It also overestimates how quickly crippled fuel infrastructure can be rebuilt even if the war ends on terms favorable to Israel and its allies.
What This Actually Means
The choice to hit Iran’s civilian fuel network is less a precision military tactic than a long-term political wager that everyday misery will eventually break public tolerance for the regime. History suggests the opposite is more likely: that foreign-imposed hardship hardens identities, validates hard-liner narratives, and leaves democratic forces weaker than before. If that pattern repeats, Israel and its partners may win short-term battlefield advantages while locking in a more unified, more anti-Western Iran for a generation.
The uncomfortable truth for planners in Jerusalem and Washington is that there may be no clean way to bomb a society’s economic organs without reshaping that society’s politics in ways they cannot control. Strikes that make it impossible to commute, to heat homes, or to keep small businesses alive are not ‘surgical’ in the eyes of those living through them. They are experienced as collective punishment—and collective punishment rarely produces the kind of political opening that advocates of regime change like to imagine.
Sources
axios.com; The New York Times; NPR; Fortune; AP News; Christian Science Monitor; The Guardian; Lieber Institute at West Point