Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, sustained injuries in the opening hours of the joint U.S.–Israeli military operations against Iran, according to Israeli assessments.
A senior Israeli security official told Epoch Magazine in Israel that Israel had received indications Mojtaba Khamenei—the son of the late supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—sustained injuries to his leg during strikes targeting his father’s bunker. The younger Khamenei was injured the same day his father was killed.
The Israeli security official said the severity of the younger Khamenei’s injury is unclear at this stage.
Mojtaba Khamenei is Iran’s third-ranking Shia Islamic cleric since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that ushered in the country’s current theocratic constitution.
Israeli security officials have assessed that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) preferred the younger Khamenei to succeed his father, as opposed to other candidates with more extensive religious and jurisprudential credentials.
Those Israeli officials believe Mojtaba Khamenei will also represent a hardline position and will seek to prolong the current fighting with Israeli and U.S. forces, especially to drive up the human and economic costs of the conflict.
“Every leader appointed by the Iranian terror regime to continue and lead the program for the destruction of Israel, to threaten the United States and the free world and the countries of the region, and to suppress the Iranian people—will be an unequivocal target for elimination,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a March 4 post on X.
“It doesn’t matter what his name is or the place where he hides.”
“I was disappointed because we think it’s going to lead to just more of the same problem for the country. So I was disappointed to see their choice,” Trump said during a press conference in Doral, Florida, on March 9.
The ongoing conflict has snarled global shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.
About 25 percent of the world’s seaborne oil leaves the Persian Gulf through the narrow waterway, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). The disruptions have spiked global oil prices.