The Israeli military on Saturday said it had killed dozens of members of Iran’s leadership during sweeping, coordinated strikes in Iran, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it had targeted a number of locations across Tehran "in which senior officials of the Iranian defense establishment had gathered."
More than 40 senior Iranian security and regime figures were eliminated in the strikes, a senior Israeli security official told Fox News.
It was one of the largest regime "decapitation operations" conducted in modern warfare history, the official added. Israeli intelligence managed to infiltrate the Iranian security echelon, making the strikes possible, the official explained.
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Among those killed, according to the IDF, were Ali Shamkhani, secretary of the Iranian Security Council who was also a personal advisor to the Iranian Supreme Leader.
Mohammad Pakpour, who was also killed, had been commander of the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps since Operation ‘Rising Lion’ and was one of the leaders of the "destruction of Israel" plan, the IDF said.
Saleh Asadi, who headed up the Intelligence Directorate of the Khatam al-Anbiya emergency command, Mohammad Shirazi, head of the Military Bureau of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei since 1989, Iran’s Defense Minister, Aziz Nasirzadeh, Hossein Jabal Amelian, who chaired an organization that advanced projects related to nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, and Reza Mozaffari-Nia, who previously chaired the same organization, were also killed, according to the IDF.
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President Donald Trump also confirmed Saturday that Khamenei was killed in the strikes.
"Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead," Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. "This is not only Justice for the people of Iran, but for all Great Americans, and those people from many Countries throughout the World, that have been killed or mutilated by Khamenei and his gang of bloodthirsty THUGS."
The leaders had all been meeting at a compound in Tehran on Saturday morning.
The strikes were moved up due to the "target of opportunity," multiple sources told Fox News, which is why the strikes happened in the daytime in Iran, keeping the element of surprise. "There was a deliberate decision to accelerate the timeline," one source said.
"This was a massive, wildly bold daytime attack," a senior US defense official told Fox News."It caught the senior leadership off guard, a Saturday morning during Ramadan and on Shabbat in the daytime."
"We hit the senior leaders right out of the gate," the source added.
