Israel says it killed two of Iran’s most senior officials in overnight strikes, in the most significant blow to the country’s wartime leadership since Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed at the outset of the conflict late last month.
Ali Larijani, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, and Gholamreza Soleimani, commander of the Basij paramilitary, were “eliminated” in strikes overnight, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a statement.
Iranian authorities did not immediately comment on the strikes or Israel’s claims. A post on Larijani’s X feed appeared to show a handwritten tribute to Iranian Navy servicemen ahead of their funeral this week, but it was not clear when it was written.
The United States placed sanctions on Larijani in January in connection with Iran’s crackdown on protesters earlier this year, which left thousands of people dead. He was responsible for coordinating a response on behalf of Iran’s supreme leader, U.S. officials said at the time, and he publicly called for Iranian security forces to violently suppress protests.
The Basij, the paramilitary forces under the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanded by Soleimani, also played a lead role in the violent crackdown on protests. “Under Soleimani, the Basij unit led the main repression operations in Iran, employing severe violence, widespread arrests, and the use of force against civilian demonstrators,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement posted to X.
Speaking to reporters at the White House on Tuesday, President Donald Trump appeared to reference Iranian officials Israel said it had killed. “A lot of people say their actual top [person] was killed yesterday, along with somebody else. … He was in charge of the killing of protesters. It’s an evil group.” Trump said.
Larijani’s death would mark one of the highest-level assassinations of Iranian officials since the killing of Khamenei in a strike on his Tehran compound on the first day of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
The military campaign has decimated Iran’s political and military leadership, destroyed critical infrastructure and damaged civilian buildings, but the weakened Iranian regime maintains its grip on powerand has stifled shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, sending oil prices spiking.
The IDF also announced the deaths in separate statements Tuesday, saying Larijani was killed in an airstrike near Tehran. Iran’s “de facto leader” led national security coordination across the country, including the repression of anti-government protesters, the IDF said.
Larijani had recently shared photos and videos that appeared to show him in Tehran on Friday for a march marking Quds Day, a day of solidarity with Palestinians held on the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan.
Larijani had remained defiant on social media in recent days. “Trump says he is looking for a speedy victory. While starting a war is easy, it cannot be won with a few tweets. We will not relent until making you sorry for this grave miscalculation,” he wrote on X last week.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu celebrated the strikes, saying that Israel is “undermining this regime in the hope of giving the Iranian people an opportunity to remove it. It will not happen all at once, and it will not happen easily. But if we persist, we will give them the chance to take their destiny into their own hands,” he said, adding that there would be “many more surprises” to come.
Katz said he and Netanyahu have instructed the IDF to “continue hunting the leadership of the regime of terror and oppression in Iran, to repeatedly lop off the head of the octopus and prevent it from growing back.” He added that he planned to update Trump about the death of “two of the highest remaining senior officials.”
Graphic by Júlia Ledur.
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