Israel and the United States Killed Iran’s Supreme Leader

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—a Shiite cleric who played a behind-the-scenes role in Iran’s Islamic Revolution, served two terms as president in the 1980s, and for more than three decades shaped the country’s politics as supreme leader—was killed on Saturday in a joint Israeli-U.S. strike on Iran. He was 86.

Khamenei’s death was announced by U.S. President Donald Trump in a post on Truth Social, in which he described the ayatollah as “one of the most evil people in history.” He provided no further details. Four Israeli security sources, however, said Khamenei was killed in an Israeli airstrike on his residence in Tehran.

The strike came at the outset of a large-scale joint operation aimed, according to sources, at dismantling Iran’s nuclear program and military infrastructure and creating conditions for a change of power. On Saturday, plumes of black smoke were seen rising over the compound, though it was unclear at the time whether the supreme leader was present during the attack. Israeli sources said the strikes targeted the country’s top military and civilian leadership, including the ayatollah.

Announcing the strike—the second joint use of force by Israel and the United States since June 2025—Donald Trump publicly urged Iranians to “take power into their own hands” once the operation concludes. He had previously appealed to Iran’s population to rise up, pledging U.S. support amid mass anti-government protests that erupted in December. Triggered by a severe economic crisis, the demonstrations quickly evolved into nationwide rallies against the entrenched theocratic system. For the first time, once-unthinkable chants of “Death to Khamenei!” were heard at street marches across the country.

The security forces responded with a harsh and bloody crackdown—according to sources, more than 6,800 protesters were killed and tens of thousands were detained. Ayatollah Khamenei blamed Trump for the unrest, calling him a “criminal” who had “openly encouraged” the protests by promising U.S. military backing.

One of the early followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—an ascetic religious leader who inspired the revolution against the pro-American monarchy—Khamenei consistently opposed the United States and Israel, rejected Western “liberalism,” and adhered to rigid fundamentalist social doctrines. After becoming Iran’s supreme leader in 1989 following Khomeini’s death, he concentrated ultimate political and religious authority in his hands, eclipsing the elected president and exerting control over the armed forces, the internal security apparatus, the judiciary, state media, and foreign policy.

The final say on the landmark nuclear agreement reached in July 2015 between Iran and six world powers, including the United States, rested with him. The deal imposed limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for relief from crippling sanctions. Despite deep mistrust of Washington’s intentions and skepticism from other hard-liners, he ultimately approved the agreement, which entered into force in January 2016.

Khamenei later appeared to grow disillusioned with that decision after Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement in 2018 during his first presidential term and reimposed sweeping sanctions. In response, Iran began disregarding certain provisions of the deal—most notably limits on the volume and quality of enriched uranium—while formally maintaining its commitment not to build nuclear weapons. The supreme leader was particularly angered by the Trump-authorized killing of Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq in January 2020. He called the operation a “cowardly act,” labeled Trump a “clown,” and rejected any proposals for new negotiations, saying their sole purpose was to aid the U.S. president’s reelection campaign.

After Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, Khamenei said the chaotic events in the United States, accompanied by unsubstantiated claims of fraud, had revealed the “ugly face of liberal democracy” and pointed to the country’s “undeniable political, civic, and moral decline.” When Iran was swept by new mass protests following the September 2022 death of a young woman detained by the morality police for violating the dress code, the supreme leader again blamed the United States and Israel and endorsed a forceful crackdown. How, he asked, could one “fail to see a foreign hand” behind such “riots.”

With his thick white beard and genial smile, Khamenei’s public persona appeared more approachable than that of his austere, yet far more revered, mentor. He was known for his fondness for Persian poetry and classic Western novels, particularly Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Yet, like the unbending Khomeini, he consistently blocked efforts by moderate forces to advance political and social reforms at home and to pursue rapprochement with the United States.

Some Iranians who knew Khamenei before his ascent to the highest office described him as a “closet moderate,” wrote Karim Sadjadpour, a leading Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a 2008 study. Others saw him differently—as a “deeply religious, ideologically rigid, anti-American cleric whose policies were stuck in the anti-imperialist euphoria of the 1979 revolution.” By the third decade of his rule, Iran had become a markedly more repressive state, particularly after security forces brutally crushed protests against the disputed reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009.

The image of Khamenei as an “impartial and benevolent mentor” gradually unraveled, revealing, in Sadjadpour’s words, a “petty, factional autocrat” who relied far more on the intelligence, security, and military apparatus than on the Muslim clergy.

He first came to prominence as an ardent supporter of the militants who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for more than 14 months. In 1981, Khamenei was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt, yet less than four months later won the presidential election, becoming the first cleric to hold the office and later securing a second term.

Khamenei supported the development of nuclear energy while insisting that Iran did not seek to build nuclear weapons, which he declared forbidden under Islam. At the same time, he categorically refused to scale back the uranium-enrichment program, viewing it as a symbol of the country’s scientific capacity, independence, and national pride. The July 2015 nuclear agreement allowed Iran to continue enriching uranium, but at a significantly lower level.

Ali Khamenei was born on July 17, 1939, in the northeastern Iranian city of Mashhad, into the family of a Shiite cleric of modest means. He was the second of eight children and, as he later recalled, the family lived in poverty—at times there was nothing in the house but bread and raisins. Khamenei recounted this in a biography published on his official website.

From an early age, he was sent to religious schools. In his late teens, he briefly traveled to Najaf—a Shiite religious center and pilgrimage city in neighboring Iraq—to continue his studies. He then moved to Qom, a city sacred to Shiites about 90 miles south of Tehran, where he studied under Khomeini for six years. In 1964, however, he was forced to interrupt his education at Qom’s prestigious Islamic seminary and return to Mashhad to care for his gravely ill father. He later acknowledged that this decision prevented him from attaining the highest levels of Islamic theological training.

Nevertheless, Khamenei mastered Arabic and eventually reached a level that allowed him to translate Arabic books into Persian. Among them were works by the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb—a fiercely anti-American ideologue of the concept of holy war in Islam, whose ideas later influenced the leadership of al-Qaeda.

In the spring of 1963, Khomeini sparked mass protests against U.S.-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, which were brutally suppressed by security forces. Khamenei was arrested by the shah’s secret police—SAVAK—and, according to his official biography, “spent 10 days under brutal torture.” In late 1964, Khomeini was expelled from Iran and spent more than 14 years in exile, most of that time in Najaf.

Between 1963 and 1976, Khamenei was arrested seven times. In total, he spent about three years in prison before being sent into a form of internal exile—to Iranshahr, in the far southeast of the country.

With the onset of the Islamic Revolution, Khamenei returned to Mashhad and took part in the street clashes that preceded the shah’s flight into exile on January 16, 1979, and Khomeini’s triumphant return to Tehran on February 1. Khomeini included Khamenei in the newly formed Islamic Revolutionary Council—a closed body that played a decisive role in governing the country after the final collapse of the remnants of the shah’s regime on February 11, 1979.

At the time a mid-ranking cleric, Khamenei was elected to Iran’s parliament in 1980 from the Islamic Republican Party, which he had helped found, and was also appointed by Khomeini to the strategically important post of Tehran’s Friday prayer imam. His weekly sermons drew crowds numbering in the tens of thousands—he often appeared with a rifle in hand—and gradually built a loyal following. Deploying his oratorical skills, he lashed out at the presumed enemies of the Islamic Revolution, above all the United States, which he denounced as the “Great Satan.”

During the same period, Khamenei briefly served as deputy defense minister and oversaw the activities of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—a paramilitary force known for its rigid loyalty to the supreme leader.

In June 1981, he narrowly escaped death when a bomb concealed in a tape recorder exploded near him during a speech at a Tehran mosque. Khamenei was seriously wounded—losing mobility in his right arm and damaging his vocal cords. Responsibility for the assassination attempt was attributed to the Mujahedin-e Khalq, an Iranian armed group that, two months later, carried out another attack that killed President Mohammad Ali Rajai and four other senior officials.

The ruling party persuaded Khamenei to run for president in a snap election in October 1981. He won by a landslide, securing 95 percent of the vote, and said in his inaugural address that the result signaled support for Islam, the clergy, independence, and the “eradication of deviation, liberalism, and American-influenced leftists.”

As president—he was reelected in November 1985—Khamenei helped govern the country during the brutal Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. During this period, he was deeply engaged in foreign outreach, traveling to Syria to sign a secret economic and military agreement, touring six African countries, addressing the U.N. General Assembly in New York, and visiting North Korea. During a visit to Zimbabwe, he angered his hosts by refusing to attend a state banquet held in his honor because women were seated at the main table and wine was served.

Shortly before Khomeini’s death in June 1989, at the age of 86, following complications from intestinal surgery, the conflict with his designated successor—Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri—came to a head. Montazeri, who died in 2009, incurred Khomeini’s wrath by condemning the mass executions of political prisoners, calling for “political and ideological reconstruction,” and criticizing the fatwa ordering Muslims to kill the writer Salman Rushdie for blasphemy. As a result, Khomeini pushed through a revision of the 1979 constitution to allow power to be transferred to a cleric of lower religious rank.

The revised constitution abolished the requirement that the supreme leader hold the status of marja-e taqlid—“source of emulation,” a theological rank traditionally reserved for grand ayatollahs in Shiite Islam. Instead, it stipulated only that the candidate be knowledgeable in Islamic law and possess “appropriate political and administrative skills.”

The change cleared the way for Khamenei, who was rapidly elevated to the rank of ayatollah—from the lower clerical status of hojatoleslam that he had held during his presidency. The day after Khomeini’s death, the Assembly of Experts—a body of Islamic theologians—elected Khamenei as supreme leader, vesting him with the country’s highest religious and political authority.

In his first address in the new post, he struck a deliberately modest tone, describing himself as a man with “many shortcomings and flaws” and “essentially just an ordinary seminary student.” He later wrote in his biography that he accepted the position without enthusiasm.

“I have always regarded my level as too low to occupy not only this extraordinarily important and demanding post, but even far less significant positions, such as the presidency,” Khamenei said. “Even now, I see myself as an ordinary religious student, possessing no exceptional qualities or special advantages.”

As supreme leader, Khamenei concentrated the key levers of power in his hands. He appointed the commanders of the armed forces, including the influential Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; approved the head of the judiciary, the leadership of state radio and television, and the imams of Friday prayers across Iranian cities; and directly and indirectly shaped the composition of the Guardian Council—a 12-member body that vets candidates for elected office and approves legislation.

In foreign policy, it was Khamenei who served as the chief architect of Tehran’s resistance to demands by leading world powers to halt uranium enrichment. Iranian authorities insisted the program was purely peaceful, intended to supply nuclear power plants and a research medical reactor. The United States and its allies, however, suspected it also created a latent pathway to acquiring fissile material necessary for building nuclear weapons.

The standoff vividly reflected Khamenei’s deep-seated grievances against the United States and his conspiratorial worldview, in which concerns about nuclear nonproliferation were dismissed as a mere “pretext” designed to prevent Iran from achieving scientific advancement and genuine energy independence. In the hands of Western countries, he argued, “knowledge has been turned into an instrument of pressure.” Speaking to Iranian nuclear specialists in February 2012, Khamenei said: “They know that we are not seeking nuclear weapons.… They know this, but they emphasize the issue in order to stop our movement.”

He did not abandon that position after the nuclear deal was announced, rejecting U.S. claims that it was the agreement—rather than his own policy—that had blocked Iran’s path to nuclear weapons. “Many years ago we issued a fatwa, based on Islamic principles, prohibiting the production of nuclear weapons,” Khamenei said in a sermon on July 18, 2015. Yet, he added, the Americans “continue to lie in their propaganda… claiming that their threat stopped Iran from producing nuclear weapons.”

In the same speech, he stressed that Iran would never abandon support for its allies in the Middle East, including groups that Washington designates as terrorist organizations. He also said there would be “no negotiations with America,” except on the nuclear issue, and blamed the Sunni-Shiite divide in the Islamic world on the United States, arguing that it was Washington that “created criminal organizations such as al-Qaeda and ISIS to divert Islamic nations from the Zionist regime.”

Despite his implacable hostility toward Israel, which he repeatedly described as a “cancerous tumor” in the Middle East, Khamenei insisted that Iran did not seek to destroy the Jewish state by military means, let alone through the use of nuclear weapons. Tehran’s objective, he said, was the dismantling of Israel and its replacement with a Palestinian state through a “popular referendum.”

At the same time, it was under his leadership that Iran stepped up support for the radical Shiite movement Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip, apparently calculating that, over time, this could provoke a mass uprising leading to the collapse of the Israeli government, analogous to the fall of the shah’s regime in 1979.

As supreme leader, Khamenei avoided foreign travel, refused to meet representatives of Western powers, and rarely missed an opportunity to display contempt for the United States, which he routinely described as “global arrogance” and the “embodiment of evil.” Speaking to students in October 2008, he said that “the hatred of the Iranian people toward America runs deep,” attributing it to “the many conspiracies the U.S. government has plotted against Iran and the Iranian people over the past 50 years.” He also warned that “anyone who tries to trample on the identity and independence of the Iranian nation will have their hand cut off.”

Khamenei rejected overtures for dialogue from President Barack Obama, including at least two personal letters, and refused any bilateral talks so long as, in his words, the United States was “holding a gun to Iran’s temple.”

In domestic politics, Khamenei intervened decisively in the crisis surrounding Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection in 2009. He dismissed opposition candidates’ allegations of widespread fraud, banned street protests, and took a hard line against demands for greater openness in society.

When Hassan Rouhani—a relatively moderate Shiite cleric—was elected president in 2013, Khamenei backed his efforts to revive the economy through negotiations to lift nuclear sanctions, while simultaneously seeking to reassure skeptical hard-liners. The arrest in July 2014 of The Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian and his subsequent trial on espionage charges reportedly reflected these internal tensions. Eighteen months later, Rezaian was released as part of a prisoner swap linked to the nuclear agreement with Iran.

Khamenei had six children with his wife, Hojasteh, whom he married through an arranged match in 1964, when she was 17. Information about immediate relatives at the time of publication was unavailable; however, their son Mojtaba, born in 1969 and regarded as a hard-liner, was said by sources to have played an important role within the Basij—a paramilitary force loyal to the supreme leader and used to suppress protests.

Among Khamenei’s brothers was his younger sibling Hadi—a reform-minded cleric who was at odds with the authorities. In 1999, he was severely beaten by members of the Basij after delivering a sermon in which he criticized the scope of the supreme leader’s powers.