TEHRAN – Just ten days before her 24th birthday, Parnia Abbasi – a poet, English teacher, and bank clerk – was martyred along with three members of her family in an Israeli airstrike that targeted a civilian residential building in western Tehran. 

Today, her final poem reads like a haunting prophecy:
“I burn,
I fade,
I become a silent star,
That turns into smoke
In your sky…”

The words were scribbled once in a notebook. Today, they linger in the memory of her close friend Maryam, who was supposed to meet her that morning. “She was everything,” Maryam tells Ham-Mihan, holding back tears. “A poet, a teacher, a daughter. She had just passed the national graduate entrance exam in management, but postponed enrollment to keep her job at the central branch of Bank Melli Iran.”

Parnia was educated, hopeful, and deeply committed to both her career and her country. She had studied translation at Qazvin University and had dreams of moving forward, of doing more, becoming more. All of that ended in a flash of fire and debris when the missile struck their apartment building in the Orchid Complex on Sattarkhan Street.

According to Maryam, the missile hit the center of the building. “That’s why the whole structure collapsed,” she explains. “Others died too. That photo—of the pink mattress stained with blood, with strands of a woman’s hair on it -- that was Parnia’s bed.”

When rescue teams began pulling bodies from the rubble, Parnia’s was the first to emerge. Then came her younger brother, Parham, a student born in 2009. Their parents—her father, a retired education worker, and her mother, a former Bank Melli employee--remained buried for hours until heavy machinery could begin excavation.

The building’s fourth block had 10 apartments. Floors three to five were completely destroyed. “It seems everyone in those units is gone,” Maryam says quietly.

The silence surrounding this tragedy has been deafening. International laws, including the Geneva Conventions and International Humanitarian Law (IHL), explicitly protect medical staff, civilians, and residential zones from military strikes. But once again, those principles were reduced to ash in the wake of indiscriminate aggression.

What remains is a mattress, some strands of hair, and the words of a young woman who once wrote of burning and fading -- never knowing how literally her verses would echo in the charred silence of a home destroyed.

Parnia’s story is not just one of war-- it is one of stolen futures, of poetry unsaid, and of lives that should have never ended in rubble and fire.

AM