Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who ruled Iran for nearly 40 years, was killed in a joint US-Israeli attack on Iran on Saturday, the country’s state media confirmed on Sunday.
“Iran’s supreme leader has reached the point of martyrdom,” state broadcaster IRIB reported on Sunday morning, hours after Israel and US President Donald Trump announced the supreme leader’s death. An Iranian broadcaster broke down in tears while reading the official statement.
State media Fars news agency reported that Khamenei was killed “in the execution of his duties” in the attack early Saturday morning “in his office in the leader’s home.”
Iran’s Foreign Ministry had previously insisted that both Khamenei, 86, and the Iranian president were “safe,” but cheers and celebrations could be heard in parts of Tehran as news of his death spread.
With Ayatollah Khamenei’s death confirmed in Iran, the Islamic Republic is likely to fall into its most serious crisis since its founding.
Here’s what we know:
Shortly after the US and Israel launched a joint attack on Iran on Saturday, Israeli sources told CNN that the airstrikes targeted Iran’s top leadership, including Ayatollah Khamenei.
Airbus satellite images showed black smoke billowing from the supreme leader’s residence in the capital Tehran. Images appear to show that several buildings on the site were severely damaged by the strike.
President Trump previously announced Hamanei’s death on the Truth social platform, calling the development “the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their homeland.”
President Trump said one of the aims of the joint US-Israel attack was regime change and called on Iranians to rise up against the government.
But it is unclear whether such a change will be brought about by Khamenei’s death, which experts say is likely to usher in hardline rule by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Khamenei’s death comes at a time when Iran is perhaps at its weakest since taking power in 1989. The country was already isolated and economically battered by decades of Western sanctions, but airstrikes by the United States and Israel dealt a severe blow to his rule in June 2025.
Just six months later, protests that began over economic grievances quickly turned political, spreading to all 31 states within weeks. The regime responded with a brutal crackdown that killed thousands of demonstrators and sparked a global outcry that included threats of intervention by the Trump administration.
The intervention took place on Saturday, with President Trump saying the U.S. military was conducting “a large-scale, ongoing operation to prevent this very evil, extremist dictatorship from threatening the core national security interests of the United States and our country.”
He also called on Iranians to “take over your government,” adding: “We have a president who will give you what you want, so let’s see how you react.”
According to Iran’s constitution, the Assembly of Experts is tasked with appointing a new supreme leader. Pending his appointment, an interim three-member council consisting of the president, the attorney general and a jurist from the country’s Guardian Council is tasked with carrying out the leadership’s duties, according to the Middle East Institute.
Who could lead Iran next remains a mystery, even to those who removed him. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in January that “no one knows” who would succeed Khamenei if he is removed from office.
“I don’t think anyone has an easy answer to what happens next in Iran if the Supreme Leader and the regime collapse,” he said.
Khamenei became the focus of many demonstrators’ anger during large-scale protests in January. Videos from some protests showed crowds chanting “Death to Khamenei” in direct defiance of his authority, while others called for his resignation. The regime used unprecedented levels of violence, and authorities branded the demonstrations a continuation of an Israeli-American conspiracy against the Islamic Republic.
The protests were the largest since 2022, when 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in religious police custody. These protests were also suppressed with lethal force.
In footage obtained by CNN from a witness in Tehran on Saturday, when news of Khamenei’s death broke, two women’s voices can be heard chanting “Death to the Islamic Republic” and “Long live the Shah” in Farsi, before cheers and whistles rang out.
In a similar video, cheers can be heard echoing through the city’s residential areas.
Khamenei’s death could trigger the biggest change in regional dynamics since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu then launched a major campaign to eliminate opponents of his country across the Middle East, including Iran and its regional proxies.
This is the second time in less than a century that the United States has acted to remove an Iranian leader from power. In 1953, Mohammad Mosaddegh, a secular, democratically elected prime minister, was overthrown in an Iranian military coup supported by the CIA and British intelligence after nationalizing the country’s oil industry. The event restored Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to the throne and played a central role in the Islamic Republic’s anti-American narrative after the monarch’s abdication in the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Khamenei regularly cites it as a symbol of US imperialism and a reason for his distrust of the West.
Iran is home to a diverse population of over 90 million people, including Persians, Azerbaijanis, Arabs, Balochs, and Kurds. Under Khamenei’s decades-long rule, the Islamic Republic has largely succeeded in containing civil unrest and ethnic unrest.
But with no clear successor, his death would raise serious concerns about the stability of not just Iran but the wider region, with potential implications for the global economy.
