{"id":321208,"date":"2026-03-04T10:51:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-04T10:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/321208\/"},"modified":"2026-03-04T10:51:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T10:51:07","slug":"iran-begins-mourning-khamenei-and-hits-u-s-sites-in-the-gulf-as-israel-targets-tehrans-new-leadership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/321208\/","title":{"rendered":"Iran begins mourning Khamenei and hits U.S. sites in the Gulf as Israel targets Tehran’s new leadership"},"content":{"rendered":"

A son of Iran’s assassinated supreme leader has emerged as a favorite to succeed his father, amid Israeli vows to kill anyone appointed to the job.<\/p>\n

Clerics charged with choosing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei\u2019s successor were considering announcing Mojtaba Khamenei’s new role as soon as this morning, The New York Times reported<\/a>, citing three Iranian officials familiar with the discussions.<\/p>\n

The New York Times report comes after semiofficial Iranian news agency Mehr news reported that Khamenei’s son was alive and well after the deadly strikes launched by the U.S. and Israel that killed his father and other family members, including Mojtaba Khamenei’s wife. <\/p>\n

Mehr reported yesterday that Mojtaba Khamenei was “overseeing matters related to the martyrs of the family, managing affairs, and providing consultation and review on important national issues.” <\/p>\n

Questions around who will succeed Khamenei have been complicated by the death of Iran\u2019s former President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in May 2024.<\/p>\n

Mojtaba Khamenei is known to hold significant influence over the administrators and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but he is not particularly popular in Iran, with father-to-son succession also being frowned upon in the country, particularly after the toppling of U.S.-backed monarchy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, he also lacks the religious credentials of his father to lead a clerical regime, which claims to represent God’s will on Earth.<\/p>\n

If he’s not already, Mojtaba Khamenei’s appointment to supreme leader would make him an immediate target, with Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warning today that any new leader would become “an unequivocal target for elimination.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A son of Iran’s assassinated supreme leader has emerged as a favorite to succeed his father, amid Israeli…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":321209,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":{"0":"post-321208","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=321208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321208\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/321209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=321208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=321208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=321208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}