Israel claimed on Tuesday to have killed Iran’s top security leader Ali Larijani while a senior Iranian official said the new supreme leader had rejected de-escalation offers conveyed by intermediaries, demanding Israel and the US first be “brought to their knees”.
The Israeli military said its jets fired 20 one-tonne bombs on an apartment in a Tehran suburb used by Larijani as a hideout. It also said Basij commander Gholamreza Soleimani and his deputy were killed in separate air strikes in Tehran on Monday night.
Analysts described Larijani as Iran’s de facto leader, saying his elimination was the biggest blow to the regime since the US assassination of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) leader Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad in January, 2020.
Larijani served as the country’s chief nuclear negotiator between 2005 and 2007 and then as speaker of Iran’s parliament for 12 years before assuming the role as adviser to the late supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.
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Israel’s prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu framed the assassination as part of a campaign to destabilise Iran and give the Iranian people “an opportunity to remove” the regime, but he cautioned the campaign would not succeed immediately.
“This will not happen at once, this will not happen easily. But if we persist . . . we will give them a chance to take their fate into their own hands,” he said.
The Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed off and US allies have rebuffed calls from US president Donald Trump to help reopen the vital waterway, through which about 20 per cent of global oil and liquefied natural gas flows.
During an Oval Office meeting with Taoiseach Micheál Martin, Trump was unable to say when ships would be able to move safely through the strategic waterway.
“I don’t believe it will take a long time,” he said. “We don’t even know if there are mines there. We are hitting them hard along the coast.”
He renewed his criticism of Nato member states for refusing to aid the US effort to open the strait. “I think Nato is making a very stupid mistake. I wonder if Nato will ever be there for us,” said Trump.
Arsenio Dominguez, the head of the International Maritime Organisation, said naval escorts through the strait cannot “100 per cent guarantee” the safety of vessels, warning that military measures are “not a long-term or sustainable solution”.
Several Gulf states, meanwhile, are urging Washington not to halt the strikes on Iran until threats to vital oil routes are neutralised, three Gulf sources told Reuters.
The Washington Post, citing US intelligence sources, reported that American intelligence believes the Iranian regime will survive for now and will be “weakened but more rigid” – with the powerful security forces of the IRGC gaining greater control.
The US-Israeli war on Iran is now in its third week, with at least 2,000 people killed and no end in sight.
On Tuesday, US and Israeli forces continued to pound what they described as regime targets across Iran while Tehran again aimed rockets and drones at Israel and Gulf states.
There are still no signs of a diplomatic breakthrough. A senior Iranian official said the new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei had “rejected proposals to reduce tensions and cease fire with the US”, which were conveyed to Tehran by two mediating countries, Reuters reported.
A UN fact-finding mission, meanwhile, has begun investigating the attack on a girls’ school in Minab, southern Iran, on the first day of the war with Iran.
Last week, sources familiar with the probe told The New York Times that an initial US military investigation found that its forces were responsible for the strike which killed at least 175 people, mostly schoolgirls.
