A senior Israeli government source told The Independent that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader and one of the most important figures in modern Middle Eastern history, was killed overnight in coordinated US-Israeli air strikes on his compound – a claim Tehran has neither confirmed nor explicitly denied.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had previously said there were “many signs” pointing to Khamenei's death, while Khamenei's office accused Israel of waging “mental warfare” – language that fell short of direct denials and has further deepened speculation about the 85-year-old cleric's fate.
President Donald Trump confirmed that the United States has carried out “major combat operations” in Iran. The Israeli military said about 200 warplanes were involved in the attack, a deployment of force on this scale that marks one of the most significant military operations in the region in decades.
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The human cost of the attacks has been severe. An attack on a girls' primary school in southern Iran has killed at least 108 people, mostly children, according to the local governor. According to Iranian media, the Iranian Red Crescent put the total death toll from the US-Israeli strikes at at least 201.
Iran has retaliated. Iranian forces launched attacks on US and Israeli military targets across the Middle East after attacks on several Iranian cities, including Tehran, on Saturday morning, setting off a direct military confrontation between Iran and Western powers that regional analysts have long warned could have devastating consequences.
Khamenei, who assumed the title of supreme leader after the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, oversaw Iran's emergence as the dominant non-Arab power in the Middle East, presiding over the country's nuclear program, its network of regional proxies and decades of confrontation with the United States and Israel.
If confirmed, his death would represent the most dramatic single development in the Middle East since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, with consequences for regional stability, Iran's internal political succession, and the trajectory of the broader conflict that are impossible to fully assess at this time.
