Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Friday night summoned the Supreme National Council to an emergency meeting at his home after learning that Israel had targeted his closest ally, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in an airstrike in Lebanon, according to three Iranian officials with knowledge of the meeting.
The Israeli military on Friday destroyed several residential buildings in the attack, Israeli and American officials said. It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Nasrallah was in one of the buildings when they were hit.
But the initial assessment of Israeli intelligence agencies was that Mr. Nasrallah had been killed, officials said. But they cautioned that assessment was preliminary and might yet change.
It was the first time that Mr. Khamenei had convened the Supreme National Council, the group that responds to national security threats, domestic and international and shapes foreign and national policy, for an emergency meeting since July 31, when Israel assassinated a top Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran.
The meeting came as Masoud Pezeshkian, the Iranian president, and the foreign ministry issued statements strongly condemning Israel’s attack, calling it “an undeniable war crime,” without naming Mr. Nasrallah.
“Iran will follow up on the Zionist’s latest crime and stand by the people of Lebanon and the resistance,” Mr. Pezeshkian said in a statement.
Privately, though, Iranian officials expressed concerned that the absence of a statement from Hezbollah on Mr. Nasrallah’s status portended bad news, the three Iranian officials said. The cellphones of Iranian officials across the country beeped with text messages and phone calls asking variations of the same question: Any news from Sayyed? It was a reference to Mr. Nasrallah by his nickname and religious title.
Iran also requested an emergency meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a forum of Muslim countries, to discuss the attack.
Speaking to the U.N. Security Council on Friday, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, accused the United States of being an accomplice to the Israeli attack, saying both countries should be held accountable.
“Netanyahu and his companions have become so viciously emboldened to dream of repeating their carnage in Lebanon and pushing the entire region into a full-scale war,” Mr. Araghchi said, referring to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “It is very clear that they are counting on U.S. support for their sinister campaign of terror and destruction.”
As Iran assesses how to respond to Israel, it faces a familiar problem: how to establish deterrence without encouraging all-out war. Analysts said that targeting Mr. Nasrallah escalated the standoff between Israel and Iran and its proxy militias to a new, more dangerous level.
Until now, Iran has refrained from letting Israel drag it into an open war, analysts said. That posture is likely to continue.
“Iran’s position seems to be that if Israel wants war, it’ll get it at the time of Iran’s choosing,” said Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group. Mr. Vaez said that Israel had decapitated Iran’s regional allies in the past, and instead of eliminating the threat, it has fed radicalization, enabling Iranian recruitment to continue.
At midnight in Tehran, the Iranian capital, supporters of the government protested in the city’s Palestine Square, waving Palestinian flags and Hezbollah’s yellow flags while chanting, “Revenge, revenge,” Iran’s state television showed.
Around 1 a.m. in Iran, state television was putting senior officials and military commanders, including the anti-Western ultraconservative Saeed Jalili, a member of the Supreme National Council, on air to reassure viewers that Hezbollah would survive even if its most senior leaders were killed.
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