Middle East:  the long nightmare

By Richard North - March 1, 2026

With Ayatollah Ali Khamenei really dead (recorded by The Times which has published his obituary), this represents a huge coup for Israeli and US intelligence gatherers.

The significance is explained by a commentator on X who points out that neither air force moved in precipitately to bomb targets in Iran.

Instead, they had waited for Iran’s entire leadership to sit down in the same room. That took months of intelligence, thousands of hours of surveillance and signal intercepts, looking for that one moment, when the Supreme Leader, the president and senior military command gathered in a single location at the same time.

Then they bombed Iran, kicking off what the US Department of War is calling “Operation Epic Fury” and the Israelis have named “Operation Roaring Lion”, untypically for operations in Iranian airspace at around 8:10 am local time – daylight.

Every previous Israeli strike on Iran has come at night: June 2025 was launched in darkness; October 2024 came after midnight. As a result, Iran’s entire air defence doctrine is built around the assumption that Israel attacks in the dark.

In this operation, Israel attacked in broad daylight because the target was not infrastructure. – it was a meeting. Reuters confirms strikes targeted Khamenei and Pezeshkian. CNN confirms months of joint US-Israeli planning. Israeli officials confirmed the strike hit the location where Iran’s top officials were gathered.

The potency of the system is highlighted by Trump, who says of Khamenei: “He was unable to avoid our Intelligence and Highly Sophisticated Tracking Systems and, working closely with Israel, there was not a thing he, or the other leaders that have been killed along with him, could do”. The president adds: “This is the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country”.

At the time I started writing this piece, there was uncertainty as to whether Khamenei was dead, even if both Trump and Netanyahu were confidently asserting that he was, with the Israelis saying that the body has been found and the White House declaring: “Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead”.

Whether or not he had been killed, the implications of the strike were catastrophic for the regime because Iran’s leadership (what’s was left of it) now knows three things: Israel knew where they were meeting. Israel knew when they were meeting. Israel knew who would be in the room.

Our commentator remarks that everything we watched over the past month – the F-22s at Ovda, the tankers at Ben Gurion, Al Udeid emptied to zero, 270 transport flights – all of it was the delivery architecture for one precision strike on one gathering. Every future meeting of Iran’s senior leadership, he says, now carries one question: does Israel know about this one too?

As such, this was not a conventional military operation, as much as a “psyop” aimed at destroying institutional trust within the regime. Every general who sits down to a meeting in the future will now wonder who told Jerusalem about the meeting yesterday. Every IRGC commander who receives a meeting summons will calculate whether attendance is duty or a death sentence.

What they must come to terms with is that every secure facility in Tehran has been proven insecure. This differs from June 2025 when the Israelis killed 30 generals in the opening minutes of the operation.

That was brute force across dispersed targets. By contrast, this was a scalpel: one meeting, one moment, after months of patient intelligence gathering.

Like a wounded animal, Iran has lashed out, firing missiles at six countries in retaliation. Most have been intercepted and casualties have been very light: one civilian dead from debris in Abu Dhabi, and no combat-related deaths or injuries reported by the US. One woman was killed in Tel Aviv after an Iranian missile strike and about 20 Israelis have been reported wounded.

Yet, the retaliation has backfired. Saudi Arabia has responded by pledging all its capabilities against Iran. There is now a Gulf coalition that did not exist yesterday which exists today, effectively facilitated by Tehran’s insistence on attacking everyone simultaneously.

Our commentator thus concludes that Israel has traded one morning of precision strikes for the permanent destruction of Iran’s command cohesion. That is not a battle, he says: “That is checkmate disguised as a first move”.

Predictably, Iran issued strong denials, dismissing reports of Khamenei’s death as propaganda or psychological warfare. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei (and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi) explicitly stated that Khamenei was “safe and sound”, along with president Masoud Pezeshkian. Araghchi who told NBC News that the Supreme Leader was “still alive, as far as I know”.

Iranian state media (e.g., Tasnim, Mehr, Fars News) initially denied the death reports outright, describing Khamenei as “steadfast and firm in commanding the field” and “confidently directing the battlefield situation”. They labelled the claims “baseless” and accused the US and Israel of spreading misinformation to sow confusion and fear.

But, as our previous commentator remarked, there had been nothing concrete since: no video; no photograph; no live broadcast; no proof of life of any kind from a regime that controls every camera, every studio, every broadcast tower in the country.

A regime that could have ended every question on earth with thirty seconds of footage has instead chosen to issue text statements through a Foreign Minister who 24 hours ago said the Supreme Leader is “still alive as far as I know”.

In the end, though, it had to confirm that which it could not deny. In the early hours of today, state media confirmed that he was dead, with satellite imagery showing his wrecked compound (pictured). It appears that Khamenei’s daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter had also been killed in the strikes.

As to Khamenei, it has long been known that the ageing Ayatollah was no longer fully in command and, as his faculties had faded, his duties had been progressively assumed by others. Now that he is dead, Iran’s Assembly of Experts (an 88-member body of senior clerics) is responsible for selecting the successor.

During the 12-day war with Israel in June 2025, while in hiding, Khamenei reportedly named three preferred candidates, one of whom could be appointed swiftly as a successor in the event of his death.

These were identified in interviews with Iranian officials and clerics (as reported by The New York Times and others) as: Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i (head of the judiciary, a hardliner with strong regime loyalty); Ali Asghar Hejazi (Khamenei’s chief of staff or a key deputy in his office, deeply involved in security and intelligence matters); and Hassan Khomeini (grandson of founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, seen as more moderate/reformist-leaning, potentially a bridge to broader factions).

Broader contingency measures include multi-layered succession plans for key military, governmental, and leadership roles (up to four backups per position) to ensure regime continuity in case of decapitation strikes or assassinations.

Longtime loyalist Ali Larijani (the former parliament speaker, now in a high security council role) has been elevated as a crisis manager or de facto interim leader in some scenarios, sidelining figures like president Masoud Pezeshkian.

Thus, while Iran has designed a machine to outlive any single man, arguably that machine has been designed to function in peacetime. It might struggle to cope while Israeli and US jets roam freely overhead, set to continue – according to Netanyahu – for “as long as necessary, with both Trump and the Israeli prime minister calling for the Iranian people to overthrow the regime.

With other key figures also killed in the strike which took out Khamenei, including the IRGC commander, the defence minister, and the head of the Supreme National Security Council, the succession plans may be difficult to implement.

Not least, the Assembly of Experts can hardly convene when Israeli intelligence may be able to target any building in which they assemble or identify members as they travel to a designated venue. Thus, Khamenei’s carefully contrived succession plans may be in tatters, leaving the regime without coherent leadership or the ability to regenerate.

Says our commentator, a regime that survived revolution, survived eight years of war with Iraq, survived Stuxnet, survived sanctions, survived 2022 protests, now faces the one scenario it cannot engineer its way out of: a succession crisis during a decapitation campaign with no ceasefire in sight.

Khamenei ruled for 35 years. The question of who rules next may not survive the next 35 hours. Whisper it cautiously, but it looks as if the long nightmare of the Iranian people might be coming to an end.