“Stuck”. That is the word most people who have spoken to the BBC use to describe life in Iran right now.

After three days of Israeli attacks, “everyone is trying to escape” Tehran “one way or another,” one resident told BBC News Persian.

On Sunday, long queues formed at petrol stations across the city. Many people tried to leave for remote areas, away from any possible Israeli target, but could not even get out of the province because of heavy traffic.

“Tehran isn’t safe, clearly,” one resident said. “We get no alarms or warnings from officials about Israeli attacks. We just hear the blasts and hope our place isn’t hit. But where can we go? Nowhere feels safe.”

One person who managed to move from Tehran to another province said: “I don’t think I’ve fully processed that I’m living in an active war zone, and I’m not sure when I’ll reach acceptance.”

“This is not my war. I’m not rooting for either side, I just want to survive along with my family.”

Since Friday, Israel hit Iran with its biggest wave of air strikes in years.

Israel’s strikes have led to retaliation from Iran, which has launched missile attacks on Israel.

At least 10 people have been killed in Israel, authorities said. Iranian media, citing the health ministry, reported that 128 people had been killed in Israeli attacks as of midday on Saturday.

One Iranian told the BBC she has not been able to sleep for two nights: “I’ve gone through really tough situations.”

She said the current situation reminds her of bombings and going to shelters during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, when she was a child.

“The difference is that back then, at least when an attack happened, we heard the air raid siren or at least warnings before it happened. But now, during this bombing or any air raid, there’s no sirens or warnings.”

Younger people, born after the war, do not know what it was like, BBC News Persian’s Ghoncheh Habibiazad said.

One woman in Tehran said she has considered leaving the city to escape the attacks.

“We’ve all wanted to go to smaller cities or villages, anywhere we can go, but each of us has loved ones who can’t leave, and we’re thinking of them,” she said. “What we’re experiencing is not fair to any of us, the people of Iran.”

“We’re all trying to get through these days in fear, exhaustion, and a lot of stress, this is extremely hard and painful.”

One resident in the capital said: “I can’t just leave Tehran. I can’t leave my elderly parents who can’t travel far and long and leave the city myself. Besides, I need to show up to work. What can I do now?”

The internet has been unstable, so it is very hard to keep in touch with people inside the country.

Many of those living outside the country are sending messages to loved ones, hoping for a reply.

Some people have also received warnings from the Israel military asking all Iranians to leave areas near military sites. People in Tehran seem most worried about this.

“How are we supposed to know where a military site is and where isn’t?” one said.

Separately, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a message to Iranians on the second day of the attacks said “the time has come” for Iranians to unite “by standing up for your freedom”.

However, people in the country have so far chosen to stay safe and there is little evidence that Netanyahu’s call has resonated on the ground, BBC News Persian’s Daryoush Karimi said.

Inside Iran, what perhaps shocked people the most was the destruction of residential buildings, even more than the attacks on nuclear facilities and airbases, said BBC News Persian’s Pouyan Kalani.

Many Iranians had not witnessed scenes like that since the end of the Iran-Iraq war – especially not on the streets of the capital.

Many of those in Tehran and elsewhere, recall the confusion of Friday: what exactly was happening; how widespread was it; and how could they protect themselves and their families?

Edited by Alexandra Fouché

The problem is that 85 of the 194 countries surveyed by the WHO technical advisory group that came up with the new estimates don’t have good enough death registries for this to be a viable approach. Forty-one of those countries are in sub-Saharan Africa.

For these countries, a team led by Jonathan Wakefield, a statistician at the University of Washington in Seattle, used the data from countries with complete death registries to build another statistical model able to predict total COVID deaths in any month from other measures, including temperature, the percentage of COVID tests returning positive, a rating of the stringency of social distancing and other measures to limit infection, and rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disease — conditions that put people at high risk of dying from COVID.

The Indian health ministry objected strongly to this model in its response to the New York Times article. But the WHO team didn’t actually use it to estimate Indian COVID deaths. India falls into an intermediate group of countries that have reasonably good data on total deaths in some regions but not in others. So Wakefield’s team used data from 17 Indian states with adequate death registries, applied the standard excess deaths approach used for countries with complete death registries, and then extrapolated from these states to the entire country.

“We only base the predictions of how many people died in India in those two years on Indian data,” Wakefield told BuzzFeed News.

Importantly, the WHO’s estimates for Indian COVID deaths also align well with other studies, including one published in the journal Science in January by a team led by Prabhat Jha, director of the Centre for Global Health Research at the University of Toronto in Canada. Jha’s team estimated COVID deaths from Indian government data and from a national survey of 137,000 people, conducted by a polling company that asked people whether a family member had died from COVID. “India has pretty high cellphone coverage, and they did random digit dialing,” Jha told BuzzFeed News.

Jha’s team estimated that more than 3.2 million people in India had died from COVID by July 2021, the majority of them during the devastating surge in COVID caused by the Delta coronavirus variant between April and June 2021. That came after the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi had relaxed COVID controls following an earlier, less severe wave. “The Indian government declared victory and said, ‘Oh India’s beat this virus,’ and complacency set in,” Jha said.

This explains the political sensitivity in India about accepting the results from studies that indicate a much higher death toll than the official count. Responding to a question from leaders of the opposition Congress party about Jha’s study in February, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare described it as “speculative” and claimed it “lacks any peer reviewed scientific data” — even though it was published in one of the world’s leading peer-reviewed scientific journals.

“It’s politics,” Jha said of the Indian government’s rejection of his study.

According to the WHO, Egypt has proportionately the largest undercount of pandemic deaths, with excess mortality running at 11.6 times the toll attributed to COVID. India, with 9.9 times more excess deaths than its official COVID death count, is in second place. Russia, meanwhile, has reported 3.5 times fewer deaths from COVID than indicated by its excess mortality.

Ariel Karlinsky of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, another member of the WHO technical advisory group, hopes the agency’s “stamp of approval” for excess mortality calculations will encourage nations to come up with more realistic numbers. “Putin doesn’t know who I am, but they do know who the WHO is,” he told BuzzFeed News.

But rather than moving to correct their COVID death numbers, some governments are apparently now withholding the all-cause mortality data used to calculate excess deaths. Belarus, which seems to be undercounting its COVID deaths by a factor of about 12, has stopped reporting its all-cause mortality data to the UN, Karlinsky said. “The sections on mortality just disappeared.”

Right now, the main concern is China, which is experiencing a significant wave of the Omicron coronavirus variant but is reporting suspiciously few deaths. If the wave now hitting Shanghai and other cities matches the pattern seen in Hong Kong since February, Jha fears that a million Chinese people may die.

Some countries have responded to excess mortality studies with greater accountability and transparency. After earlier excess deaths analyses suggested that Peru was underreporting its COVID deaths by a factor of 2.7, the South American nation went through its medical and death records in detail and revised its death toll in May 2021 to a figure closely matching the excess deaths analysis. It is now reporting the highest official per-capita death rate from COVID of any nation. “Peru did what I would have liked every country to do,” Karlinsky said.

The WHO’s new estimates of total excess pandemic deaths will include people who died from other causes because health systems were overwhelmed, as well as people killed by the coronavirus.

Karlinsky, who is an economist, said he started analyzing excess deaths because he wondered whether “the cure was worse than the disease” — in particular, he feared that lockdowns could cause more deaths than the coronavirus, in part through increases in suicides. But the data told a very different story.

In countries like New Zealand that had strict lockdowns but low levels of COVID, there is no excess deaths signal. There is also no evidence of a global epidemic of suicide during the pandemic — in the US, suicides actually decreased. Only in a few countries like Nicaragua, where people seem to have avoided going to the hospital because they were worried about getting infected, are there signs that deaths from other causes such as heart disease have increased, according to Karlinsky.

“Excess mortality is about equal to COVID mortality,” he added.

Here are the key events on day three of the Israel-Iran conflict.

Here’s where things stand on Sunday, June 15:

Fighting

• Iran fired two separate salvoes of missiles and drones against Israel, including one that struck the Israeli port city of Haifa. At least 15 people were injured.
• Israel also fired a barrage of missiles against Iran, targeting several locations, including the capital Tehran, a Foreign Ministry building there, a military base of the Defence Ministry in Isfahan, and an aerial refuelling aircraft at Mashhad Airport.
• In Israel, rescue workers were searching for survivors in the rubble from the previous night’s wave of Iranian strikes. The hardest hit area was the town of Bat Yam, where dozens of buildings were damaged.

Casualties and disruption

• At least 128 people were killed by Israeli attacks across Iran on Friday and Saturday, Iran’s Health Ministry has been quoted by local media as saying.
• Overnight, Iran struck the Israeli port city of Haifa and neighbouring Tamra, where at least four women were killed.
• Since the start of the conflict on Thursday, at least 13 people have been killed and 380 have been wounded in Israel.
• The Israeli Civil Aviation Authority has announced a complete closure of airspace and airports. Iranian airspace is also closed.

Diplomacy

• Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Tehran does not seek to expand the conflict to neighbouring countries unless forced to.
• Araghchi also said Iran has “solid evidence” of the support provided by the United States to Israel’s attacks.
• Talking to Fox News, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seemed to clearly confirm that, saying he informed US President Donald Trump ahead of launching the attacks.
• Netanyahu also projected that regime change in Iran could be a result of Israel’s attacks.
• Trump warned Tehran not to widen its retaliation to include US targets and didn’t rule out more direct US involvement beyond the vast arsenal and intelligence the US provides to Israel.
• Contrarily, the US president also claimed peace could be reached “soon”, suggesting that many diplomatic meetings were taking place.
• He also said he would be “open” to his Russian counterpart President Vladimir Putin serving as a mediator.
• French President Emmanuel Macron rebuked that idea, saying it would not be a good idea to have Putin, embroiled in his own war in Ukraine, as a mediator in the Israel-Iran conflict.
• European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has called a videoconference of EU foreign ministers for Tuesday to discuss the Middle East crisis.
• Hopes for a diplomatic solution seem distant for now, though they will no doubt be high on the agenda of the Group of Seven summit beginning Monday in Canada.

Doctors in India say 270 bodies have been recovered from the site of Thursday’s plane crash in Ahmedabad.

The London-bound aircraft crashed into a residential area shortly after take-off killing all but one of the 242 passengers and crew members, a 40-year-old British man.

Officials have also been trying to establish how many people were killed on the ground and have been continuing the slow process of matching DNA samples to confirm the victims’ identities.

Vigils honouring the dead have taken place across India and the UK.

About 100 people gathered outside the High Commission of India in London on Sunday, with many laying candles in memory of those who died in the crash.

One community leader said they had been in touch with a family who had flown to India to identify the remains of their loved ones and were waiting in hospital for the results of DNA matching.

Many people at the gathering want answers on how and why the incident could have happened, the community leader said.

India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) is leading the inquiry into the cause of the crash, helped by teams from the US and UK.

On Friday, a black box was found at the site of the crash which India’s civil aviation minister, Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu, said would “significantly aid the inquiry” into the disaster.

Less than 60 seconds after leaving Ahmedabad’s Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport, the plane lost altitude and crashed into a building that was used as doctors’ accommodation at the BJ Medical College and Civil Hospital.

On Saturday, the President of the Junior Doctors’ Association of the college, Dr Dhaval Gameti, confirmed the hospital had received the bodies of 270 victims.

Of those, 241 are believed to be passengers and crew of Flight AI171.

More than thirty victims have also been formally identified using DNA samples provided by relatives.

According to data by tracking website, Flightradar24, the Boeing Dreamliner 787-8 was 11 years old and had operated 25 flights from Ahmedabad to London Gatwick in the past two years.

In response to Thursday’s crash, India’s aviation regulator, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), ordered additional safety checks on Air India’s Boeing 787-8 and 787-9 fleet, describing it as a “preventive measure”.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi spent around 20 minutes walking around the site of the plane crash on Friday.

He also visited the hospital to meet some of those injured in the disaster, including the sole plane survivor Vishwashkumar Ramesh, later saying that “the entire nation is praying for their speedy recovery”.

Air India CEO Campbell Wilson also went to the crash site on Friday and described the visit as “deeply moving”.