Israel Claims to Have Eliminated Iran's De Facto Leader Ali Larijani

The Israeli military on Tuesday announced it has eliminated Iran’s de facto leader, Ali Larijani, with an airstrike.

If the remnants of Iran’s government confirm his death, he will be the highest-level leader of the terrorist regime to be eliminated since Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei died in the first hour of the war, and he could prove to be a greater operational loss than the elderly cleric was.

“I was just informed by the Chief of Staff that the Secretary of the National Security Council, Larijani, and the head of the Basij — Iran’s main suppression body — Soleimani, were eliminated tonight and joined the head of the destruction plan, Khamenei, and all the thwarted members of the evil axis in the depths of hell,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Tuesday.

Gholamreza Soleimani was the commander of the Basij, the thuggish militia deployed by the Iranian regime to keep its people in line during uprisings.

Soleimani assumed command of the Basij six months ago, meaning he was in charge during Iran’s violent suppression of the “Bloody November” protests in 2019, the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement in 2022, and the massive popular uprising in January 2025. The regime admitted to murdering almost 10,000 of its own people to suppress the latest uprising and some observers believe the true death toll was over three times that high.

Soleimani, 61, was under sanctions from the United States, Canada, and the European Union for his part in brutally repressing the Iranian people.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said Soleimani was eliminated by a “targeted strike yesterday in the heart of Tehran” that was “guided by precise intelligence.”

The IDF described Larijani as “the effective leader of the Iranian terror regime,” with a rap sheet that included “violent enforcement measures and repression operations,” including personal supervision of “the massacre that was carried out against Iranian protesters.”

Larijani, 67, brought scholarly credentials and a calm demeanor to his decades in the politics of the Islamic Republic. He was the consummate insider, born to a family so powerful and well-connected that it has been compared to the Kennedy dynasty in the United States.

The Larijani family popped up on American media’s radar during Iran’s brutal crackdown on protesters in January because Ali Larijani’s daughter Fatemeh held a position with Emory University in Georgia. The university severed its relationship with her in late January under intense public pressure as the death toll in the crackdown supervised by her father mounted.

Ali Larijani’s various positions included a stint in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the elite and extremist theocratic wing of the Iranian military, and chairmanship of Iran’s state broadcaster IRIB, which he mismanaged so badly that he was accused of driving Iranian youth to seek foreign media.

Larijani climbed to the highest echelon of power in 2008, when he became speaker of the Iranian parliament for three consecutive terms, gaining influence over state policy decisions and becoming chief nuclear negotiator for the Obama nuclear deal in 2015. He made three runs at the presidency, losing in the first round of voting in 2005, and then getting disqualified by the theocratic Guardian Council in 2021 and 2024. The Guardian Council never really explained why it disqualified him, but observers believed it simply had its heart set on other hardline candidates.

Larijani also bounced in and out of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), nominally an advisory body to the Supreme Leader. Larijani is the only person in the half-century history of the Islamic Republic to serve as Secretary of the SNSC twice, a position that has served as a springboard to the presidency for other leaders. His second stint began in August 2025, when he was appointed to the post by President Masoud Pezeshkian.

Although he had developed a reputation as a reasonable negotiator and an academic with genuine interest in the Western world, Larijani became a very different animal when he returned to the SNSC for the second time, growing intransigent on nuclear negotiations with the United States and contemptuous of the Iranian people who spoke out against the regime. The U.S. held him personally responsible for authorizing live fire against defenseless civilians when imposing a new round of sanctions against Tehran in mid-January.

President Pezeshkian and Supreme Leader Khamenei seemingly backed Larijani as the kingpin who could hold the tottering regime together against domestic protests and international condemnation.

Dissident website IranWire in January quoted a former Iranian official who said Larijani deliberately modeled his crackdown on China’s massacre of student protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989, viewing that horrendous killing spree as a decisive blow that kept the Communist regime in power for decades afterward. This source said Larijani also took inspiration from China moderating and reforming its hardline Communist system, and saw himself as a visionary leader who could pursue a similar reform agenda — once domestic dissent had been ruthlessly extinguished.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said on Tuesday that the eliminations of Larijani and Soleimani would make Iranians “safer,” as their loss deals a severe blow to Iran’s “repression mechanism.”

The Iranian regime did not immediately confirm either death. On Tuesday, a few hours after his purported death, a handwritten note commemorating Iran’s destroyed navy and slain sailors was published on Larijani’s X account. A funeral for the sailors was scheduled for later on Tuesday. It was not clear if the regime posted the note in an effort to dispute Israel’s account of Larijani’s death.