As Strikes Continue, Iran Promises to Avenge the Death of its Leader
Iran’s surviving leadership stated that the old guard would remain in control as attacks from the United States and Israel began their second day. Iran targeted Israel and U.S. allies in the Gulf on Sunday over the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as Israel bombarded the Iranian capital of Tehran in a campaign that risked devolving into a protracted conflict with no clear exit.
Many people in the region were still trying to figure out the full impact of the shocking events of the previous day, which started with a surprise attack by the United States and Israel on Iran and ended with President Trump announcing that Ayatollah Khamenei was dead. Although the end of his authoritarian rule was celebrated by some common Iranians, his death also sparked profound uncertainty regarding Iran’s future.
Israeli and American officials are hoping the attacks on Iran’s leadership, military, and missile program will degrade the country’s ability to fight back, but a more vulnerable Iran could also be more unpredictable.
On Sunday, the leaders of Iran promised that they would not be stopped by the death of Ayatollah Khamenei. Ali Larijani, the nation’s top national security official, predicted that Iran would strike targets in Israel and the United States “with a force they have never experienced before.” He told the state media that the country would be run by an interim committee until a new leader was chosen. On Sunday morning, Iranian missile barrages repeatedly hit Israel, forcing a lot of the country into fortified shelters.
Magen David Adom, Israel’s emergency service, reports that an Iranian ballistic missile struck a residential building in downtown Tel Aviv after evading the country’s air defenses and killing at least one woman. As local air defenses attempted to repel Iranian drones, explosions recurred in Qatar, Bahrain, and the UAE. Overnight, Israel and the United States announced that they were continuing their attacks on Iran.
President Trump said on social media that U.S. strikes would continue “throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”
By Sunday morning, the Israeli military said its air force was again bombarding “the heart of Tehran.” As airstrikes resumed, The New York Times-verified videos showed two massive white and gray smoke plumes rising above Tehran. According to shipping companies and Tasnim, Iran’s semiofficial state media, the fighting has already prevented shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the route through which one fifth of the world’s oil is transported. Early on Sunday, major airports, including Dubai International in the United Arab Emirates, were shut down. Here’s what else to know:
Iranian succession: According to Iranian state media, in addition to the supreme leader, several other senior Iranian figures were killed in the strikes. The Assembly of Experts, a conservative group of clerics who, given the ayatollah’s age, have probably given sufficient consideration to potential successors, has the authority to select a new supreme leader. In the interim, the clerical Guardian Council jurist, the head of the judiciary, and the president of Iran will be in charge. Find out more: Civilian toll: The effects of the attacks on Iranian civilians were not immediately clear.
At least 133 civilians had been killed and 200 others had been injured late Saturday, according to HRANA, an Iranian rights group based in Washington. These numbers could not be independently verified. At a girls’ elementary school near a naval base, dozens of children had been killed, according to Iranian state media. Israeli and American militaries did not immediately respond. Celebrations in Tehran: Fireworks lit up the night sky and the streets were filled with loud Persian dance music as some people in Iran’s capital celebrated the death of the supreme leader.
Tasnim says that intelligence targets the supreme leader, who was killed in an attack early on Saturday in his home office. The United States and Israel had spent months developing deep intelligence on the Iranian leadership, according to people familiar with the operation. Find out more: Shipping impacts: Oil prices will almost certainly rise as a result of the Strait of Hormuz being closed.
The U.S. According to Tasnim, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards stated that the strait was unsafe for commercial traffic, and the Maritime Administration advised vessels to avoid it. Iran fired another round of ballistic missiles at Israel, setting off air-raid sirens throughout the country. According to Israel’s emergency response agency, Magen David Adom, a projectile landed in central Israel, causing a number of injuries, including the serious condition of a young child.
Since the war started on Saturday, Israel’s air defenses have generally been able to stop Iranian attacks, but some missiles have still been able to escape detection.
Ayatollah Khamenei’s iron grip on power in Iran comes to an end
The death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was announced by US President Donald Trump on the first day of extensive US and Israeli air strikes on Iran. The death of the 86-year-old ruler of the past three decades – one of the longest in the world – was later confirmed on Iranian state TV.
Iran has had only two supreme leaders since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
The supreme leader is head of the state and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, including the elite Revolutionary Guards. This is an office with unlimited authority. Khamenei is not exactly a dictator because he is in the middle of a complicated web of competing power centers and has the ability to veto any public policy decision and select candidates for public office. Young Iranians have never lived without him as their leader. State television has covered Khamenei’s every move. His image is plastered on billboards in public spaces and his photograph is ubiquitous in shops.
At home, Iranian presidents have frequently taken center stage. However, Khamenei was the one in charge at home. His death, in such violent circumstances, heralds a new and uncertain future, both in Iran and the wider region.
In 1939, Ali Khamenei was born in Mashhad, an Iranian city in the north-eastern region. The second of eight children in a religious family, his father was a mid-ranking cleric from the Shia branch of Islam, the dominant sect in Iran.
Khamenei would later romanticise his “poor but pious” childhood, saying he frequently ate nothing but “bread and raisins”.
His education was dominated by the study of the Quran, and he qualified as a cleric by the age of 11. However, like a lot of the time’s religious leaders, his work was equally political and spiritual. An effective orator, Khamenei joined the critics of the Shah of Iran: the monarch who was eventually overthrown by the Islamic revolution.
For years, he lived underground or festered in jail. He was tortured and forced into internal exile after being detained six times by the Shah’s secret police. After the Islamic revolution, its leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini appointed him Friday prayer leader of the capital, Tehran.
His political sermons were broadcast across the nation each week. It made Khamenei an integral part of the country’s new leadership. In the tumultuous first months after the revolution, a group of militant university students loyal to Khomeini occupied the US embassy. The hostages included dozens of diplomats and embassy staff. Students were protesting against America’s decision to provide the ousted Shah with sanctuary, and the revolutionary leaders of Iran, including Khamenei, supported the students. The hostage-taking lasted for 444 days.
It set Iran on the anti-American and anti-Western path that would become the revolution’s defining path and helped bring down the Carter administration in the United States. Additionally, the incident marked the beginning of Iran’s decades-long isolation from the outside world. Khamenei was fortunate to survive an attempted assassination shortly after the crisis. In June 1981, a dissident group hid a bomb inside a tape recorder. It exploded as he delivered a lecture.
He was severely hurt. His lungs took months to recover, and he permanently lost the use of his right arm.
Later that year, President Mohammad-Ali Rajai was assassinated and Khamenei stood in the ensuing election to succeed him in the largely ceremonial role.
The outcome was never in doubt because Khomeini controlled who could stand. Khamenei won with 97% of the vote.
His inaugural address, in which he decried “deviation, liberalism, and American-influenced leftists,” set the tone for his presidency. Khamenei became a wartime leader while in office. Months earlier, the country’s neighbour, Iraq, had invaded. Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, was worried that Khomeini’s Islamic revolution would spread to other countries and overthrow his own government. It was a vicious and bloody war that lasted for eight years, with hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides.
Many of the commanders and soldiers Khamenei knew and met were killed on the front lines, where he spent months at a time. The Iraqi army used chemical weapons on border villages in Iran and launched missile attacks on far-flung cities, including Tehran, the capital. Iran, for its part, relied on human waves to break Iraqi lines, made up of devout youngsters, some barely of fighting age.
There were a lot of dead people. Khamenei’s deep distrust of the United States and the West, which had supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion, grew stronger during the war. The Assembly of Experts, a council of clerics, selected Khamenei as Khomeini’s successor in 1989. Khomeini had passed away at the age of 86. The new supreme leader was chosen despite what was seen as a weak record of achievement in religious scholarship.
“I am an individual with many faults and shortcomings and truly a minor seminarian,” he admitted in his first speech in office.
“However, a responsibility has been placed on my shoulders, and in order to be able to bear this heavy responsibility, I will use all of my capabilities and faith in the almighty.” Lacking both the respect of the clergy and Khomeini’s personal popularity, the new supreme leader moved cautiously to build his own power base.
But over the next 30 years, Khamenei built loyalist networks in every part of the Iranian establishment, including the media, the clerical elite, the judiciary, the parliament, and the police. Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, Karim Sadjadpour, claims that the supreme leader has relied on a “tight-knit cartel of hardline clergymen and nouveau riche Revolutionary Guardsmen” for power. In addition, Khamenei supported political repression and the arbitrary arrest of political opponents by encouraging a cult of personality to ensure public devotion. He reportedly lived sparingly in a compound in central Tehran with his wife, six children, and numerous grandchildren and rarely traveled abroad. He defeated opposition at home.
The student protests of 1999 were dangerous, but they were stopped. A decade later, protesters were pepper-sprayed, beaten, and shot during a revolt against an allegedly rigged presidential election. In 2019, when skyrocketing fuel prices sparked street protests, Khamenei prevented illegal marches by blocking the internet for days. Amnesty International claims that the police then fatally shot protesters with machine guns. He did get rid of the obstacles to women’s education set up by his predecessor. However, Khamenei was against gender parity. Women who opposed the hijab were arrested, subjected to torture, and kept in solitary confinement. Those who supported them were also targeted. 38 years in prison and 148 lashes were given to a human rights lawyer.
In addition, the 2022 death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who was accused of failing to properly wear her hijab, posed one of the greatest threats to the Islamic revolution. During the protests that followed her death, human rights groups claimed that security forces killed over 550 people and detained 20,000 of them. Khamenei has come under fire for leading a pariah state on a global scale. Iran was included in President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States, along with Iraq and North Korea. Iran has used Hezbollah – the armed Shia group in Lebanon – as a Khamenei proxy in a semi-permanent conflict with Israel.
However, despite the fact that he has preached “Death to America” to his people, his foreign policy was carefully designed to avoid direct confrontation with Washington or accommodation. Nuclear weapons were the subject of the greatest contention. Twenty years ago, Khamenei declared that their development was against Islam and issued a fatwa prohibiting it. But, under his rule, Israel and the West became convinced that Iran had sought to secretly develop a nuclear weapons capability.
The sanctions imposed by world powers in response helped impoverish a country that was once one of world’s biggest exporters of oil – and high unemployment led to widespread discontent.
Khamenei expressed doubt that the United States would uphold the 2015 nuclear deal, which restricted Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for relief from sanctions. In 2018, Trump abandoned the nuclear deal and reinstated sanctions on Iran to compel it to negotiate a replacement.
After Qasem Soleimani, a top Revolutionary Guards general who was close to the supreme leader, was killed in Iraq two years later by the president, Khamenei vowing vengeance and joining Russia and China more closely. Iran launched barrages of missiles at Israeli cities in June 2025 when Israeli forces attacked the country, targeting its nuclear program, ballistic missile arsenal, and top military commanders. Khamenei vowed never to surrender when the Americans joined the war and struck three crucial Iranian nuclear facilities. However, for the first time in a long time, he appeared weak.
The failure of the Iranian economy sparked a wave of street protests against Khamenei’s regime in January 2026. It responded with a brutal crackdown that, according to human rights groups, resulted in the deaths of at least 6,488 protesters and the detention of another 53,700. Trump threatened to strike Iran if it did not agree to a new deal on its nuclear program and give up what he referred to as its “sinister nuclear ambitions” in the weeks that followed.
However, Khamenei insisted on continuing uranium enrichment. He warned at the end of January 2026, “The Americans should know that if they start a war, this time it will be a regional war.” Iran’s power levers have remained firm and frequently brutal under Khamenei’s control. At times, the supreme leader has presented himself as almost above politics – looking down on the squabbling between Iran’s reformists and conservatives.
However, Ayatollah Khamenei rarely permitted dissent to become overbearing or the implementation of policies he opposed. The laws he enacted currently govern life in Iran. Few can say with certainty who will succeed him, and – therefore – what changes might come.
Top Iranian security official says interim government will be formed Sunday.
Following the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in an Israeli strike, the country’s top official in charge of national security stated that an interim council would be established on Sunday. In comments carried by Iranian state media, Ali Larijani, the security official, said the president, the head of the judiciary and a member of the Council of Guardians, a powerful group of jurists, would temporarily govern until a new leader was chosen.
After the death of its longtime ruler, who was at the center of the country’s theocratic system, the move suggested that the Islamic Republic was eager to project a sense of continuity. Before he was killed, Khamenei had delegated much of the running of the country to Mr. Larijani, a veteran politician and former commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps. The ascent of Mr. Masoud Pezeshkian, the president of Iran, had been overlooked by Larijani. Mr. Smith stated, “Iran fired missiles at the United States and Israel yesterday, and they did hurt.” In a social media post on Sunday, Larijani stated. “Today we will hit them with a force that they have never experienced before.”
Last year, during Iran’s 12-day war with Israel, Mr. Khamenei named three candidates who could succeed him, but they were never publicly identified. Though Mr. Larijani appears to be largely running the country, he is not regarded as a candidate because he is not a senior Shiite cleric — a fundamental qualification for any successor.
Mr. Larijani was, however, ensconced in Mr. The trusted circle of Khamenei. He was in charge of working with Iran’s powerful allies, like Russia, to use deadly force to put an end to the recent protests demanding the end of Islamic rule. He also oversaw nuclear negotiations with Washington, and was tasked with devising plans on what to do if war with the United States were to break out.
The Iranian leadership had been preparing for its political survival and mobilizing its military and security forces in the weeks leading up to the assault. Those deliberations, described by six officials familiar with the planning, touched on a range of matters, including who would manage the country if Mr. Khamenei and top officials were killed.
The leaders also considered who could be “the Delcy of Iran,” a reference to Delcy Rodríguez, the Venezuelan vice president who made a deal with the Trump administration to run the Latin American country after U.S. forces captured its president, Nicolás Maduro.
Mr. Larijani sits at the top of the list, three officials familiar with the planning said in the weeks before the attack.
