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Marrakech – Israel’s Defence Minister, Israel Katz, announced on Tuesday that Iran’s top security official, Ali Larijani, was killed in an overnight airstrike on Tehran. The Israeli forces also claimed the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Basij paramilitary force, Gholamreza Soleimani, was killed in a separate strike. Iran has not confirmed either claim.
If verified, Larijani’s death would mark the highest-profile assassination since the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the first day of the US-Israeli war on Iran, launched on February 28.
“Larijani and the Basij commander were eliminated overnight and joined Khamenei, the head of the annihilation programme, along with all those eliminated from the axis of evil in the depths of hell,” Katz said in a televised statement.
Israeli media reported that Larijani was struck alongside his son in a hideout apartment. A senior Israeli official told reporters there was “no chance he survived this attack.” The strike had originally been planned for the previous night but was postponed, with intelligence received Monday afternoon pinpointing his location.
Larijani was last seen publicly on Friday, marching at a Quds Day rally in central Tehran alongside President Masoud Pezeshkian. Speaking to Iranian state TV during the rally, he dismissed the ongoing bombardment as a sign of “desperation” by Iran’s enemies. “These attacks are out of fear, out of desperation. One who is strong wouldn’t bomb demonstrations at all,” he said.
Hours after the claimed assassination, a handwritten note was published on Larijani’s social media accounts and shared by Iranian state-linked outlets. The note commemorated 84 Iranian sailors killed when the IRIS Dena warship was sunk by a US torpedo off Sri Lanka on March 4. It carried no timestamp, and it remained unclear whether it was intended as proof of life.
Born in 1958 in Najaf, Iraq, Larijani belonged to one of Iran’s most powerful political families. He earned a degree in mathematics and computer science before completing a doctorate in Western philosophy focused on Immanuel Kant.
After the 1979 revolution, he joined the IRGC, then moved into government. He served as culture minister, head of state broadcasting, and chief nuclear negotiator between 2005 and 2007. He was speaker of parliament for 12 years before being reappointed secretary of the Supreme National Security Council in August 2025.
Analysts described him as a pragmatic figure within the establishment, though his tone hardened sharply after the war began. In a post on X days into the conflict, Larijani wrote: “Unlike the United States, Iran has prepared itself for a long war.”
Israel said it also targeted Soleimani, who had led the Basij since 2019. The Basij is a volunteer paramilitary force under the IRGC tasked with internal security enforcement. It played a central role in suppressing mass protests in January, as well as earlier uprisings in 2009 and 2022. Soleimani was sanctioned by the US, EU, UK, and Canada.
Katz said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed the military to “continue hunting down the leadership of the regime.” The office of the prime minister released a photo of Netanyahu on the phone, captioned with a statement confirming he had ordered the targeting of senior Iranian figures.
Netanyahu himself has faced persistent unverified claims of being killed earlier in the ongoing Middle East war, with videos posted of him since widely dismissed by skeptics as AI-generated content.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Mohamad Elmasry, a professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, said the US and Israel were playing a “game of whack-a-mole” in Iran. “There’s always another leader, so I don’t think this is going to suggest any kind of collapse of the Iranian regime,” he said. “Having said that, this is very significant symbolically and psychologically.”
The claimed killings came on day 18 of the war, as US-Israeli strikes continued to hit cities across Iran. Explosions were reported in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, and Ahvaz. At least 1,444 people have been killed and over 18,500 injured across Iran since February 28, according to Iran’s health ministry.
