Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader who dominated the nation for nearly 4 a long time, has been killed, according to US President Donald Trump and two Israeli sources.
Israel has not shared proof of Khamenei’s demise, and a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry earlier insisted that Khamenei, 86, and Iran’s president are each “safe and sound.”
But Khamenei has not been seen in public or in movies since Israel and the United States attacked Iran on Saturday morning.
The information appeared seemingly to plunge the Islamic Republic into essentially the most severe disaster since its institution.
Cheers and celebrations have been heard in components of Tehran Saturday night time following stories of Khamenei’s demise.
Here’s what we know:
Soon after the United States and Israel started joint strikes on Iran on Saturday, Israeli sources advised NCS that airstrikes focused Iran’s high management, together with Khamenei.
Satellite photos from Airbus showed black smoke rising from the supreme leader’s compound within the capital, Tehran. The photos seem to present that a number of buildings within the compound have been severely broken by strikes.
Trump has described Khamenei’s reported demise as “the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country.”
In asserting the joint US-Israeli assault, Trump mentioned one in every of its goals was regime change, and he known as on the Iranian folks to stand up towards the federal government as soon as operations completed. However, it was unclear whether or not such change would consequence from Khamenei’s demise, which appeared seemingly to usher in hard-line rule by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, consultants mentioned.
The stories of Khamenei’s demise come at a time when Iran is arguably at its weakest since he took energy within the 1989. Decades of Western sanctions had already left the nation remoted and economically battered earlier than US and Israeli strikes in June 2025 dealt his rule a extreme blow.
Just six months later, protests that started over financial grievances rapidly turned political, spreading throughout all 31 of the nation’s provinces inside weeks. The regime responded with a brutal crackdown, killing hundreds of protesters and prompting a world outcry, together with a menace of intervention from the Trump administration.
That intervention got here on Saturday, when Trump mentioned the US army was endeavor a “massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests.”
He additionally known as on the Iranian folks to “take over your government,” including that they now “have a president who is giving you what you want, so let’s see how you respond.”
According to Iran’s structure, an Assembly of Experts could be tasked with appointing a brand new supreme leader. Until that appointment, an interim three-member council — consisting of the president, the pinnacle of the judiciary and a jurist of the nation’s Guardian Council — is tasked with finishing up the duties of the leader, according to the Middle East Institute.
Who may lead Iran subsequent stays a thriller, even to those that have eliminated him. In January, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio mentioned that “no one knows” who would take over if Khamenei was eliminated.
“I don’t think anyone can give you a simple answer to what happens next in Iran if the supreme leader and the regime were to fall,” he mentioned.
During widespread protests in January, Khamenei was the main focus of many demonstrators’ anger. Videos from some protests confirmed crowds chanting “Death to Khamenei” in direct defiance of his authority, whereas others known as for his removing. The regime employed unprecedented ranges of violence, with officers framing the demonstrations as a continuation of an Israeli-American conspiracy towards the Islamic Republic.
The protests have been the most important because the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini whereas within the custody of the non secular police in 2022. Those protests have been additionally suppressed with lethal drive.
In one video obtained by NCS from an eyewitness in Tehran on Saturday as stories of Khamenei’s demise circulated, the voices of two girls may be heard chanting, “Death to the Islamic Republic” and “Long Live the shah,” in Farsi, earlier than cheers and whistles erupt.
In an analogous video, cheers are heard echoing throughout a residential neighborhood within the metropolis.
Khamenei’s demise would have the potential to set off the best shift in regional dynamics because the Hamas-led assault on Israel on October 7, 2023, after which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a sweeping marketing campaign to remove actors hostile to his nation throughout the Middle East — together with Iran and its regional proxies.
It could be the second time in lower than a century that the United States has acted to take away an Iranian leader from energy. In 1953, Mohammad Mossadegh, a secular, democratically elected prime minister, was overthrown in an Iranian military coup backed by the CIA and British intelligence after he nationalized the nation’s oil trade. That occasion restored Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to the throne and, after the monarch was deposed within the 1979 Islamic revolution, performed a central position within the Islamic Republic’s anti-US narrative. It commonly cited by Khamenei as a logo of US imperialism and the explanation for his mistrust of the West.
Iran is house to a various inhabitants of greater than 90 million, together with Persians, Azeris, Arabs, Baloch and Kurds. Under Khamenei’s decades-long rule, the Islamic Republic largely managed to comprise civil and ethnic unrest.
But with no clear successor, his demise would increase severe issues in regards to the stability of Iran, in addition to the broader area, with potential penalties for the worldwide economic system.
