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Join on Telegram Marrakech – Israel struck the compound of Iran’s Assembly of Experts in the holy city of Qom on Tuesday, targeting the 88-member body as it was convening to select a successor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in US-Israeli airstrikes on Saturday.
Iranian news agencies reported the building was “flattened” in the strike. Iranian state media, however, said the compound had been evacuated before the attack. No casualties have been reported.
A senior Israeli official told Israeli public broadcaster KAN that the army struck the Council of Experts “while they were convening to choose a new supreme leader.” An Israeli source also confirmed to CNN that the strike was intended to hit the assembly while its members were voting to elect the country’s next leader.
Iran’s semi-official Mehr News Agency said the targeted structure in Qom was an old auxiliary building not used for official meetings. Iran’s Press TV described the strikes as “American-Zionist” attacks. Images from the site showed large plumes of smoke rising from the compound.
Earlier on Tuesday, a member of the Assembly told Iran’s ISNA news agency that choosing a new supreme leader “won’t take long.” Cleric Ali Moalemi said the body would make its decision based on religious criteria and its own judgment, without regard to political factions, and would select a person similar to Khamenei.
The Qom strike came hours after the Israeli Air Force launched what it described as a ninth wave of strikes in Tehran, targeting Iran’s central leadership compound.
Read also: US-Israeli Strikes Kill 787 in Iran as Tehran Rejects Talks, Vows Retaliation
The compound housed the Presidential Office, the Supreme National Security Council headquarters, a senior officials’ meeting facility, and a military officer training institution. The IDF said it deployed approximately 100 fighter jets dropping over 250 bombs on the complex overnight.
The Israeli military said the leadership compound was “one of the most heavily secured assets in Iran” and that the strike followed prolonged intelligence collection aimed at degrading Iran’s command and control systems.
On Monday evening, Iran’s Assembly of Experts compound in Tehran was also targeted in US-Israeli strikes, according to state media.
The strikes on Tuesday marked the fourth day of Operation Roaring Lion, the joint US-Israeli military campaign that began Saturday and killed Khamenei along with numerous senior Iranian military and intelligence officials. As of Monday night, the IDF had dropped over 2,500 bombs on Iran and struck more than 600 targets.
The Israeli military also said its air force struck industrial sites “throughout Iran” used to produce weapons, particularly ballistic missiles.
The strike on the Assembly of Experts carried significance far surpassing its physical destruction. By hitting the body responsible for transferring supreme authority at the precise moment it was doing so, Israel struck at the Islamic Republic’s constitutional core.
Beyond targeting this high-value infrastructure at the heart of Iran’s political system, the Israelis’ overarching aim was to hit and compromise the regime’s very capacity to legally and religiously reproduce itself while under fire.
