Rabat – Israel’s defense minister Israel Katz has said that the successor of Iran’s slain Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is a “target for elimination.”
Since Sunday, the streets of Iranian cities have flooded with people who have come to mourn the “martyrdom” of their supreme leader.
Khamenei was assassinated at age 86 in the initial US-Israeli strikes on Saturday, February 28. Khamenei began his rule in 1989, and served as supreme leader for 36 years and six months, making him the longest-serving head of state in the Middle East.
Following the assasination, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian stated that a leadership council would temporarily assume the duties of Supreme Leader. This council consists of President Masoud Pezeshkian, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Gholam-Hossein Mohesni-Eji, and a member of the Guardian Council, Ayatollah Alireza Arafi.
As the rapidly escalating war entered its fifth day on Wednesday, Israel’s defense minister stated that “every leader appointed by the Iranian terror regime to continue and lead the plan to destroy Israel, to threaten the United States and the free world and the countries of the region – will be a target for elimination.”
This threat comes as Iranian leaders met on Tuesday to discuss the anointment of late Supreme Leader Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, a hard-liner who would likely carry on his father’s legacy.
Since his father’s killing over the weekend, both internal sources and international observers have dubbed the 56-year-old Mojtaba as his father’s most likely successor. As a cleric known for managing his late father’s office and cultivating close ties to the Revolutionary Guards, he has emerged as the most natural pick to sustain the legacy of the slain Supreme Leader.
The club of Iran’s top clerics, known as the Assembly of Experts, considered announcing the identity of the country’s news leader on Wednesday morning. But they have instead reportedly refrained from doing so, in fear that it would make the newly picked Supreme Leader a target for the United States and Israel. `