US and Israeli air strikes hit 4,000 targets in the first 100 hours of its bombing campaign against Iran, with more attacks being carried out by the US Air Force than in the first six months of its air campaign against Islamic State 10 years ago.

Israel has hit twice as many targets in Iran as it did in Gaza over the same timespan, according to figures compiled by Airwars, a non-partisan organisation which monitors bombing campaigns and their impact on civilians.

Iran is under one of the most intense air attacks in history, the US and Israel seeking to force its unconditional surrender or regime change, according to Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Neither outcome is likely, as air wars alone and unsupported by ground troops have never succeeded in achieving these goals in the past.

Yet possibly the true US and Israeli intention is to turn Iran into another Gaza by pulverising a whole society and its modern infrastructure, returning Iranians to a pre-modern era by destroying their electric power stations and fuel supplies. In the Vietnam War, US Air Force general Curtis LeMay was widely criticised for threatening to bomb North Vietnam “back to the Stone Age”, but the same destructive, if unspoken, intent may today be inspiring the bombing campaign against Iran.

As obvious military and security targets are destroyed and the enemy shows no sign of giving up, those conducting bombing offensives display less and less concern for civilian loss of life. Not that such a concern was ever high up the Trump administration’s agenda, going by fresh film footage confirming that it was a US Tomahawk missile that struck near a girl’s elementary in southern Iran on 28 February killing 168 children and staff. Trump, true to form, had claimed it was an Iranian missile that destroyed the school.

Iran said on Monday that 1,255 people had been killed in the bombing so far, including 200 children. This was broadly confirmed by the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, which gives a figure of 1,168 civilians dead.

Israel is now targeting civilian infrastructure, including oil storage tanks in Tehran, where blazing fuel ran down drainage channels beside roads and huge clouds of oily black smoke darkened the sky over the capital. The US says it is not attacking Iran’s oil production facilities, including the crucial oil export terminal at Kharg Island on the Gulf but Israel may well do so.

Past bombing campaigns in the Middle East have generally become exercises in communal punishment and destruction. In Gaza, some 72,000 Palestinians were killed by Israel, mostly by airstrikes, including 20,000 children, according to the UN. Israel always claimed to be targeting Hamas command centres when civilians were killed, but at the end of the war, Hamas was still in control of Gaza, though its cities were turned into rubble.

Southern Lebanon is likewise coming under unrelenting Israeli air attack, with 500,000 refugees and nearly 400 dead, according to the Lebanese government. But the Shia paramilitary group Hezbollah is still in control of its own areas, even if it is a much diminished military force.

All air forces boast of the precise accuracy of their munitions, but this does them no good unless they know what they are targeting. The US Air Force always lied about this during its last big bombing campaign, which was against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2019, a fact proved by detailed post-war studies.

In one township called Suwaira, south of the Iraqi city of Mosul, which had been held by the Islamic State, the US Air Force claimed that only one civilian had been killed during 40 US air strikes. But a door-to-door investigation conducted by the New York Times discovered that the true figure was 43 civilian dead, including 16 children.

Much the same happened in the Islamic State-held city of Raqqa in Syria in 2017, where the US Air Force claimed to have only hit military or security targets. But when I visited the city soon after it was recaptured, every street was in ruins with scarcely a house intact.

Iran is now getting much the same scorched-earth treatment. Power stations, water desalination plants and fuel depots have been hit or are under threat. This collateral damage to civilians is not entirely accidental. Those in charge of the air campaign may want to prove to civilians that their own government is too weak to protect them.

Bombing campaigns have a fatal habit of ending up as acts of communal punishment. But this is more likely to alienate those on the receiving end than provoke them to rise up against the Iranian authorities, supposing this was ever feasible when those authorities have total control of the security apparatus and are backed by a core of ideologically-inspired supporters.

Iranian strategy is clear: to endure and survive whatever the US and Israel can throw at them, hoping all the while that a world energy crisis will put Trump under irresistible pressure to end the war at home and abroad. To this end, Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz and is firing missiles and drones at refineries, liquefied natural gas facilities and airports throughout the Gulf.

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The economies of the six Arab states on the western side of the Gulf – Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates and Oman – are fragile because of their dependence on oil and gas exports. On Monday, an oil refinery in Bahrain was on fire and five drones were fired at Saudi Arabia’s giant Shaybah oilfield. Significantly, the Gulf states are eager to hide their vulnerability insofar as they can, with Qatar arresting 313 people for taking videos of Iranian strikes and “spreading false rumours”.

Less often identified as a vulnerable victim of the mounting crisis in the Gulf is Iraq, previously the third or fourth-largest oil exporter in the world but now reduced to using a single small export pipeline through Turkey. As an Arab state with a Shia Muslim majority, Iraq risks being drawn deeper into the crisis, particularly if Tehran wants to use pro-Iranian militias against other Gulf states, notably Kuwait, just across the Iraqi border.

All the Iranian regime needs to do to win the war is to survive it. But if Trump wants to win, he will have to escalate, possibly sending in US ground troops to seize the Iranian side of the Strait of Hormuz. Master of the U-turn he may be, but he is stuck in a trap of his own making.

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