Israel has claimed two high profile assassinations of Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, according to Israel’s Defence Minister Katz, and the commander of the internal Basij militia, Gholamreza Soleimani, neither of which Iran has commented on or confirmed
Iranian state media published a handwritten note by Larijani, though it is not clear whether it is intended as proof of life. Larijani’s note published on his social media outlets commemorates the memory of 84 Iranian sailors killed, whose funeral is expected to be held on Tuesday, in the US attack on their boat in international waters.
If confirmed, Larijani would be the highest level assassination in the war since United States-Israeli strikes killed the former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and several members of his family on the first day of the war they launched on February 28.
Larijani was last seen publicly on Friday, attending the al-Quds day rally in support of Palestinians in Tehran, along with Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian.
Larijani has been a key political figure in the Iranian hierarchy for years, at one time leading the nation’s nuclear negotiations with the West. He was also previously the Iranian Speaker of the Parliament.
Katz, Israel’s defence minister, said “the leaders of the regime are being killed and their capabilities terminated.”
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“Our army is working with strength to continue to hit and terminate the missile capabilities as well as the strategic infrastructure,” he wrote on social media.
Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim, reporting from the occupied West Bank, said the claimed assassination will be celebrated in Israel as a major strategic success.
“But even if Larijani has been assassinated, that does not mean the whole regime has fallen,” Ibrahim said.
Al Jazeera’s Tohid Asadi, reporting from Tehran, said US-Israeli attacks were not limited to the capital, Tehran, but were reported in cities across the country, including Ahvaz, Isfahan and Shiraz.
Israel kills Basij force commander
The Israeli military also claimed in a post on X Tuesday that it had killed Gholamreza Soleimani, the commander of the Basij unit, the internal security paramilitary militia of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
“Guided by precise intelligence from Military Intelligence, the Air Force conducted a targeted strike yesterday in the heart of Tehran, eliminating Gholam Reza Soleimani, commander of the Basij unit over the past six years,” it said.
Iran has not confirmed this claim either.
Mohamad Elmasry, 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 US Treasury records Soleimani’s birth year as 1965. He has been sanctioned by the United States, the European Union and other countries for his alleged role in suppressing dissent through the Basij.
The Basij is a volunteer paramilitary force under Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), founded after the 1979 revolution and tasked with enforcing internal security nationwide.
It operates local branches across cities and is frequently deployed on the front lines of protests to crack down, including the antigovernment demonstrations that erupted across Iran in January, in which thousands were reportedly killed, and stretching back to the 2009 mass protests against what opponents called a stolen presidential election.
The Basij and other internal security forces have been frequent targets of attack by the US and Israeli forces so far in the war.
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