TEHRAN – Ten days before his 24th birthday, Poet, English teacher and bank clerk, Pania Abbasi, martial artist along with three members of the family in an Israeli airstrike targeting a private residential building in western Tehran.
Today, her final poem reads like an unforgettable prophecy:
“I’m burning,
I’ll fade,
I’ll be a silent star,
It turns into smoke
In your sky…”
The words were scribbled once in a notebook. Today they are remembered by her best friend Mariam, who was supposed to see her that morning. “She was everything,” Mariam holds back tears to Hammihan. “Poet, teacher, daughter. She had just passed the entrance exam for the national management graduates, but she postponed registration and continued her job at the central branch of the Bank of Iran.”
Pernia was educated, hopeful and deeply committed to both her career and her country. She studied translation at Qazvin University, dreamed of moving forward, doing more, and doing more. All that ended with a flash of fire and debris as the missile raided an apartment in the Orchid Complex on Sattarkan Street.
According to Maryam, the missile hit the center of the building. “That’s why the whole structure collapsed,” she explains. “Other people have also passed away. The photo shows a pink mattress stained with blood and a Parnia bed with a chain of women’s hair above it.”
Pernia was first shown when rescuers began pulling the body from the roof rack. Then came my younger brother, Perham, who was born in 2009. Their parents (retired education workers) and her mother, a former bank employee, Meri, were buried for hours before heavy machinery began excavation.
There were 10 apartments on the fourth block of the building. The 3rd to 5th floors were completely destroyed. “It seems like everyone in those units has disappeared,” Mariam says quietly.
The silence surrounding this tragedy was deafening. International law, including the Geneva Convention and International Humanitarian Law (IHL), explicitly protects medical staff, civilians and housing zones from military strikes. But once again, these principles have been brought to ashes in the wake of indiscriminate attacks.
What remains are the words of a young woman who once wrote about mattress, some of her hair, and what once burns and fades. I don’t know how her poems literally destroyed the burnt silence of the house.
The story of Pernia is not one of the wars, but one of the stolen futures, one of the lives that should not end with tile rubs or fire, without poetry.
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