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Iran’s state television has confirmed that the country’s longtime supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed on Saturday, hours after the US and Israel pounded the Islamic Republic with air strikes and urged its people to seize power from the regime.
The Supreme National Security Council in a statement announced seven days of public holidays and 40 days of mourning. It vowed revenge for the “martyrdom” of a leader who “opened a new chapter of ruling in Islam’s history” during his 37-year leadership.
US President Donald Trump had earlier cast the killing as both retribution and liberation, and told Iranians they had an opportunity to take control of their country.
“Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead,” Trump said on Truth Social on Saturday afternoon. His killing was “justice” for Iranians and Americans who had been killed by the supreme leader and his “thugs”.
“This is the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country. We are hearing that many of their [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], Military, and other Security and Police Forces, no longer want to fight, and are looking for Immunity from us,” Trump wrote.
Satellite imagery showed widespread destruction of the supreme leader’s compound.
The Israeli military had also said that at least seven senior Iranian defence officials were killed during the first wave of US and Israeli air strikes on the Islamic nation.
In his Truth Social post, Trump said “heavy and pinpoint bombing” of Iran would “continue uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST”.
Khamenei, the 86-year-old cleric, has ruled over Iran for nearly four decades. His death marks a watershed moment for the Middle East. It also leaves a power vacuum at the top of a country of 93mn people in the world’s most important energy-producing region.
The move to decapitate Iran’s leadership marked another demonstration of US military might and comes less than two months after Trump authorised special forces to capture Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro.
Trump, who had styled himself a leader who would end American involvement in the kind of Middle Eastern wars that scarred his predecessors’ terms in office, made a stark call for regime change in Tehran as he launched the war.
“The United States military is undertaking a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests,” the president said.
“We are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday evening that strikes in the coming days would hit “thousands of targets . . . to create the conditions for the brave Iranian nation to free itself”.
According to Iranian officials, 118 people were killed in a missile attack on a school in the city of Minab.
The joint US-Israeli attack prompted swift retaliation from Iran, igniting fears that the conflict could quickly spread through the region.
Israel said it had intercepted several missile attacks. But at least one person was killed after an Iranian missile struck the Tel Aviv area late on Saturday night — the first Israeli casualty since the start of the latest flare-up with Iran.
Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which host US military bases, said they had thwarted retaliatory missile attacks while Jordan said it had intercepted two ballistic missiles.
Saudi Arabia said Iran had targeted its capital Riyadh and its oil-rich eastern province. Kuwait said a drone had struck its international airport, causing limited damage, while an apparent drone also struck Dubai’s Fairmont Hotel.
The joint operation is the US and Israel’s most significant attempt to overthrow the Islamic regime since it swept to power in 1979 in a revolution that redrew the political map of the Middle East and transformed Iran into one of America’s fiercest adversaries.
Analysts said the assault, which the Pentagon has dubbed Operation Epic Fury, would push up oil prices as supplies from the Gulf faced disruption.
Iranian media reported the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway vital to the global crude market, had been “effectively” closed after the IRGC warned some vessels that passage through it was unsafe.
A US official told the FT that Washington was not planning on releasing oil from its strategic petroleum reserve to offset any supply disruption.
The attacks follow weeks of tension as Trump sought to press Tehran over its nuclear programme, ordering the largest American military build-up in the region since the 2003 Iraq war.
Reporting by James Politi, Steff Chávez, Amy Mackinnon, Abigail Hauslohner, Lauren Fedor, Najmeh Bozorgmehr, Bita Ghaffari, James Shotter, Neri Zilber, Mehul Srivastava and Peter Wells