{"id":514453,"date":"2026-03-10T06:04:20","date_gmt":"2026-03-10T06:04:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/514453\/"},"modified":"2026-03-10T06:04:20","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T06:04:20","slug":"oil-prices-fall-as-trump-threatens-iran-with-fire-and-fury-over-strait-of-hormuz-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/514453\/","title":{"rendered":"Oil prices fall as Trump threatens Iran with ‘fire and fury’ over Strait of Hormuz"},"content":{"rendered":"

Iran’s new untested leader faces an existential battlepublished at 05:39 GMT<\/p>\n

05:39 GMT<\/p>\n

\"\"Lyse Doucet
Chief international correspondent<\/p>\n

\"MojtabaImage source, Reuters<\/p>\n

A leader who has never been fully tested takes the helm in Iran when its theocracy faces its greatest test in five decades.<\/p>\n

Continuity and connections have pulled Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, to the top after the assassination of his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in the first salvos of this war.<\/p>\n

But Iran’s third supreme leader since its 1979 revolution takes charge as the Islamic Republic confronts an existential battle.<\/p>\n

For those who still mourn the loss of the many thousands killed in that crackdown on those protests, a harsh, hardline regime seems set to become even harsher.<\/p>\n

Mojtaba Khamenei worked for decades in his father’s shadow; he knows all the details about how the deep state works when it confronts external threats and internal upheaval.<\/p>\n

And this war is no longer just a political fight; it’s intensely personal. It’s also about revenge.<\/p>\n

Mojtaba Khamenei lost not just his father in the Israeli strike on the supreme leader’s compound, but also his mother, Mansoureh Khojasteh Bagherzadeh, his wife Zahra Haddad-Adel, as well as a son, on that fateful Saturday morning.<\/p>\n

Trump is warning that Mojtaba Khamenei “won’t last long”. He is in Israel’s sights too, with Defence Minister Israel Katz calling him “an unequivocal target”.<\/p>\n

So Khamenei may still remain in the shadows for a while. It will deepen the mystery around this reclusive cleric.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Iran’s new untested leader faces an existential battlepublished at 05:39 GMT 05:39 GMT Lyse DoucetChief international correspondent Image…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":514454,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-514453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=514453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/514454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=514453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=514453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=514453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}