Esmaeil Khatib, the Iranian intelligence minister, became the country’s latest high-ranking official to be targeted in the U.S.-Israeli military campaign.
Israel’s military said on Wednesday that it had killed Mr. Khatib in an overnight airstrike. The Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, confirmed the killing in a social media post later in the day, calling it “a cowardly assassination.”
Mr. Khatib is the latest top Iranian official to be killed since the United States and Israel launched their joint attack last month. An airstrike killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on the first day of the war.
The Israeli military said Mr. Khatib’s ministry oversaw “surveillance, espionage, and the execution of covert operations worldwide,” particularly against the state of Israel.
He also played a significant role in the brutal crackdown on the recent anti-government protests in Iran, and led his ministry’s “terrorist activities against Israeli and American targets around the world,” the Israeli military said.
In 2022, the United States imposed sanctions on both Mr. Khatib and Iran’s intelligence ministry. The ministry, under Mr. Khatib’s leadership, conducted “cyber espionage and ransomware attacks in support of Iran’s political goals,” the U.S. Treasury Department said.
Mr. Khatib had also been a member of Iran’s previous conservative government and oversaw mass arrests and crackdowns during a women-led uprising in 2022 that followed the death of Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran’s morality police.
He was appointed intelligence minister in 2021, and previously held key positions in Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards, according to the Israeli military.
Isabel Kershner, a senior correspondent for The Times in Jerusalem, has been reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs since 1990.
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