This is a developing story. More to follow very soon.
EDIT 1
Supreme Ayatollah Khamenei was killed a few moments ago, a senior Israeli official told journalists off the record.
Footage of Khamenei’s body was allegedly presented to Prime Minister Netanyahu a few minutes ago. No official statement has been published.
EDIT 2
Videos in Farsi published on social media show some people cheering in Tehran from their apartments.
https://x.com/ManotoNews/status/2027835583146463736
These videos are not authentified. They could very well be true or AI.
EDIT 3
Headline of Maariv newspaper is now “Khamenei is killed”
“After decades of absolute rule, Israel confirms that the end of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, has come”
EDIT 4
Reuters says Khamenei has been killed according to an Israeli official.
Iran DENIES the information and says Ayatollah Khamenei is fully in command.
https://www.reuters.com/world/iran-crisis-live-explosions-tehran-israel-announces-strike-2026-02-28/
EDIT 6
Some Iranian opposition accounts are celebrating.
Association of French-Iranian women says “YES, Finally”
https://x.com/femmeazadi/status/2027836456119443519
Iranian Sana Ebrahimi published video of herself dancing
https://x.com/__Injaneb96/status/2027841112610676910
EDIT 7
Politician Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Canadian Opposition, claims Ayatollah Khamenei is killed
https://x.com/PierrePoilievre/status/2027845628391526774
EDIT 8
I̶D̶F̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶f̶i̶r̶m̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶d̶e̶a̶t̶h̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶K̶h̶a̶m̶e̶n̶e̶i̶
The IDF said several Iranian leaders are killed, including the Defense Minister and Ali Shamkhani, the closest advisor of the Ayatollah
EDIT 9
Iranian Researcher Khosrol Isfahani published videos of people honking in the streets on social media
https://x.com/KhosroIsfahani/status/2027839875500912833
EDIT 10
Donald Trump told NBC News that he feels reports about the death of Khamenei are correct.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-responds-reports-ayatollah-death-rcna261149
EDIT 11
Iran International, the largest Iranian political opposition network, says Ayatollah Khamenei have been killed according to their own sources.
https://x.com/IranIntl_En/status/2027846843061633455
https://www.iranintl.com/fa/liveblog/20260228-Iranwar
EDIT 12
A french far-left politician who was questioned by police about her support for Hamas-Hezbollah just published a burning american flag. She really mad.
EDIT 13
Farnaz Fassihi, an iranian-american journalist, says she spoke on the phone with her sources in Tehran
Many people are celebrating but she says the information is NOT confirmed.
🚨 New York Times claims Trump confirms
EDIT 14
Official statement from the White House.
IT’S OVER FOLKS !!!
Anyone celebrating this, you HAVE to understand that the US and Israel did NOT do this because it was what the Iranian people wanted, they did it because it was what THEY want. Whether this will actually be good or bad for the Iranian people makes absolutely no difference to the US and Israel. They don’t care about the Iranian people, they don’t respect the Iranian people. This was a selfish act on the part of the US and Israel, not a selfless one.
I’m hoping the Iranian people can come out of this a better country. But you are totally correct in that the US did this for the oil not the people.
So long as the new governance is approved by Israel and The West. They better not try to democratically elect a leftist or socialist otherwise they’re gonna get a Western backed dictator forced on them instead.
Gas, mostly.
I know that Trump did do this for himself.
On the other hand, the Mullah dictatorship murdered Thousand of protesters during the last months, so they can get fcked!!!
Both can be true and the act does not need to be selfless to be good.
Khamenei was a monster. It doesn’t matter how or why he’s dead. Good riddance, may he burn in hell for an eternity.
It doesn’t matter whether a monster is killed by someone with noble intentions or a monster is killed by another monster. Either way there’s one less monster in the world.
It does matter. It matters. And it’s so, so important that people understand that it matters. This attitude of, “the ends justify the means,” is very dangerous. The Iranian nation has had their autonomy taken away from them, first by Khamenei and now by the US and Israel. They are powerless, subject to the whims of people more powerful than them. They don’t make their own decisions about their own nation, the decisions are made for them by people who have enough guns and strongmen to impose their will on them.
Edit: think of it like this: let’s say you’re living down the street from a family with an abusive father. The guy is just cruel to his wife and kids. So one day you decide to take matters into your own hands and you go and shoot the dad dead. That’s good, right? The cruel, abusive father is dead, so it’s good and justified, right? But you didn’t ask the wife or the kids if they wanted their father to be killed. You didn’t care what they wanted, because you didn’t do it for them. You did it for you. You did it because it was what YOU wanted. And if they get mad at you for it, you say oh they’re just ingrates. They don’t appreciate what I did for THEM. But, it wasn’t for them. It was never for them. It was for you.
Edit 2: so what would the alternative be? What could we do to stop this cruel father that doesn’t require us to take matters into our own hands? Law. We need the rule of law. What would any reasonable person in a modern society do in this situation? They’d call the police. That’s what we need: the rule of law. Not countries deciding unilaterally who lives and who dies, but laws. Laws that apply to all of us, equally.
Are you saying they got their autonomy back in the last month after that asshole executed 30,000 people? Pretty sure they didn’t have autonomy for quite a few decades now. They have slim chance to take it back. The odds are the IRGC will hold onto control, but it’s ridiculous to imply they somehow lost autonomy twice. You either got it or you don’t and with the IRGC around they don’t have autonomy.
In you’re little analogy is the abusive dad always saying he wants to kill me and was handing out guns to people in the neighbourhood, telling them to take shots at me, which resulted in one of my kids getting killed? Then the abusive dad starts putting together a bazooka, all the while saying he’s going to kill me?
Your analogy kinda sucks. The abusive person is up to all kinds of shit in the neighbourhood and gets himself killed. If he was abusing his family and not going out into the neighbourhood and causing shit, he probably wouldn’t have gotten killed. But he’d still be a shitbag.
The wife and kids may or may not be upset by him getting killed, but I wouldn’t expect anyone in the neighbourhood to stick up for an abuser like you currently seem to be doing. Very bizarre to attempt of some analogy to be all “think of the children” over a guy that was such a terrible person.
That’s true. The Iranian nation hasn’t had its own autonomy for some time. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.
I mean, if you want to expand the analogy, let’s talk about how the neighborhood vigilante has been interfering in the affairs of the family of the abusive father, long before the abusive father was even in power. Like in 1951 when the family’s parliament voted to nationalize their oil industry and as a result the vigilante and his old friend helped carry out a coup of the family’s democratically elected prime minister (operation Ajax), and replaced him with an autocrat. Or in 1980 when the vigilante aided another abusive dad, a fella by the name of Saddam Hussein, in his invasion of the home of the abusive father and his family. An invasion and war that resulted in half a million deaths, and that Hussein guy using chemical weapons against the poor family.
It’s dishonest to talk only of the crimes of the abusive father but not acknowledge the crimes of vigilante. And that’s the thing about vigilantism: answering crimes with crimes is not a viable or moral solution. It’s lawlessness and chaos, and a self perpetuating cycle of violence.
Well, that terrible person is dead. Now what? You gonna take care of those kids? Or are you just going to wait until another abusive father comes and takes the places of the one you just killed?
I’m glad he’s dead, but the fear is that this creates an even worse situation.
Attempts to remove a dictator by force are usually not possible without a lengthy occupation. There’s no new government or leaders ready to form a new government that is better for the Iranian people. An occupation is also unlikely to have good results. This isn’t reforming Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan, this is something else entirely. I would expect the people of Iran to not respond well to aggressors occupying their country. This is at best Afghanistan 2, but likely worse
For sure. It seems the thinking is the Iranian people might rise up and overthrow the regime. But that’s just throwing a dice and hoping for the best. A month ago that could have happened, but the regime has already machine gunned down so many people and executed so many more, that is that going to happen now? A lot of things would have to line up for that kind of thing to work and it’s impossible to make a movement among a population work like a military operation.
Something that seems to have gotten lost in this is the fact that Iran was enriching uranium. The Uranium Iran gets from Russia is already enriched by Russia to the level suitable to be used in their nuclear reactor. People seem to discount the Uranium enrichment as propaganda (because of the lies of W Bush) but this is science. They were enriching Uranium to 60%, if they continued you’d be in a situation where a country that calls the US “the Great Satan” and has officially said they want to “wipe Israel off the map” could have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.
All things considered, it would have been best to have continued the agreement Obama made with Iran. The reports from IAEA indicated they were abiding by that agreement. But Trump cancelled that in his first term, which made this war all but inevitable. There is truth to the statement that we can’t have a fundamentalist regime whose goal is to be an existential threat to other counties be in the possession of nuclear weapons. What Trump doesn’t say is he cancelled the agreement that was preventing that before. Iran was unlikely to sign onto a new agreement (at least not in good faith) after Trump cancelled the old one and assassinated their top general. Trump did all of the acts of war in his first term, and only now is having the actual war.
Given the mess Trump created in hist first term, he painted himself into a corner and this war was the most likely outcome. So now there’s nothing to do but wait and see what happens next. I hope for the best for the Iranian people even though it would be a big political win for Trump if it does work out.
Tbh, any nation that doesn’t have nuclear weapons should be rushing to make them. after what we saw in Ukraine and well Iran this week.
Ultimately your country can be taken over whenever by whoever unless you have nuclear weapons. That’s the way our world is now. Might = Right.
I hate it but it’s where we are now
Well yeah, the Iran nuclear program started when W. Bush did his axis of evil speech naming off a hit list of countries the US would be going after… Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
But none of that negates the fact that Iran was developing nuclear weapons while stating many times their goal was to be an existential threat to another country.
Maybe if you’re making nukes don’t go on and on about how you’re going to destroy another country while doing so? If you do that, you shouldn’t be all that shocked when that country starts bombing you. The actions of the Iranian regime were really nuts when you think about it.
So wait let me get this straight. The US threatened Iran’s right to exist, Iran begins to develop nuclear weapons, and now they’re the bad guy for threatening the US’s right to exist. The very country that threatened them first
There are no good guys and bad guys. That’s a child’s understanding of the world.
Iran was building nukes while threatening countries that have the capability of bombing them. The Iranian regime made a major miscalculation there, it’s painfully obvious to anyone that can think strategically at all. They’re incompetent, which happens when you have hateful religious zealots running a country.
They also happen to be evil as demonstrated by the fact they executed people by the tens of thousands in the last month. I’m not sad the Ayatollah is dead. May he burn in hell.
If you’d refer to my first comment in this chain you’d see this comment wasn’t necessary
Just fishing for an argument rest of the conversation be damned
We don’t need to mourn the monster killed by monsters, but we SHOULD remember that even in this short time many innocents have also been killed in the process.
We should also remember the many many many innocents killed by the monster that now lays dead.
I think this is obvious. We’re talking about a geopolitical war here. All the parties are looking exclusively looking to advance their own interests. That being said, I think we can criticize Israel and the US for attacking Iran for the way that they did, but also celebrate the deaths of this evil bastard as well as stand with the Iranian people who want their country back.
I can’t believe there are people dumb enough that this needs to be pointed out, but yes, a thousand times yes. Upvote for visibility.
I fully understand this, yet I am happy about Khamenei getting blown to bits. Now we just have to do the same thing to Trump and Bibi ^^
The same thing with people cheering on Maduro’s capture. People don’t care this is not a selfless act, they simply hope things finally start to get better.
Now and infuriatingly Trump has achieved infamy as the worst generator of anxiety in history.
Furthermore, even if you, perhaps understandably, aren’t a big fan of the concept of a Theocratic supreme leader, your personal feelings on that fact are really beside the point.
For better or worse, Iran has been the one of only countries on the world stage to materially support Palestinian resistance, and opposed Israeli expansionism.
You can’t support the Palestinian cause and cheer on this war/the death of the Ayatollah. Certainly not before there’s a free and unified Palestine, anyway.
Who the fuck cares, Iranians finally got justice after decades of abuse and poverty
The Iranians have not gotten justice. I don’t need convincing that he was a bad dude, but his death doesn’t cement freedom, and imo the attacks reduce stability and prosperity for Iranians.
Libya should demonstrate that things can in fact get worse
Look to Libya and Afghanistan, they did not get better