How Pizza Orders Predicted Israel’s Strike on Iran

In the hours leading up to Israel’s airstrike on Iran, the most unexpected tipoff didn’t come from intelligence leaks or diplomatic statements; it came from a spike in pizza orders.

Online sleuths monitoring restaurant foot traffic near the Pentagon noticed a sudden, short-lived surge in activity at pizza takeouts around 7 PM. Within an hour and a half, explosions were reported in Tehran.

It wasn’t the first time: pizza delivery data had shown similar surges before the 1991 Gulf War, Operation Desert Fox in 1998, and even Israel’s 2024 missile strike on Iran.

With open-source tools like Google’s live traffic data now widely used, analysts are learning to pay attention not just to troop movements or flight paths, but to pepperoni patterns.

A quiet bar near the Pentagon, paired with surging pizza shops, was read as an unusual but revealing signal of late-night military activity. While not a formal method of intelligence, this food-focused trend has become a bizarrely accurate indicator of major geopolitical events.

In the era of data saturation, it seems dinner orders are becoming an unexpected early-warning system, and your next slice might just mean something more.