IRANIAN President Masoud Pezeshkian has confirmed that Israel killed Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib in an overnight attack, marking the third assassination of a high-ranking Iranian official in two days.
The announcement on Wednesday comes hours after Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz claimed the Iranian minister had been killed.
Iranian security chief Ali Larijani and Gholamreza Soleimani, head of the Basij paramilitary force, were also killed in Israeli air strikes on Tuesday.
Pezeshkian condemned the “cowardly assassination of my dear colleagues”, saying they “left us heartbroken.” In a post on X, he added that their “path will continue stronger than before.”
Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim, reporting from the occupied West Bank, said Israeli military analysts regarded Khatib as having been a trusted figure close to Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei.
“According to Israeli sources, they said they have been gathering intelligence that allowed them in the past 24 hours to declare the deaths of three senior Iranian officials,” Ibrahim said.
Katz also announced that he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had given the Israeli military standing authorisation to eliminate other senior Iranian officials in their sights without case-by-case approval.
“This is seen as another success from the Israeli perspective in targeting the Iranian leadership,” she said.
Reporting from Tehran, Al Jazeera’s Mohamed Vall said, “In terms of his credentials, he ‘ticked every box’ in Iran, having graduated from the influential seminary in Qom and previously studied under the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.”
“So he was really one of the top clerics, and he even has the title, Proof of Islam, one of the highest titles in the country. “He is really well placed, religiously, ideologically and with decades of experience in the circles of intelligence, particularly civilian intelligence,” Vall added.
“He’s a man whose killing, no doubt about it, will cause a dent to the remaining structure of the regime, the government. So that is what the Israelis are counting on,” he concluded.
The US Department of State offered a $10m reward on Friday for information about Iran’s new supreme leader and other top officials, including Khatib.
A funeral ceremony for Larijani and Soleimani was held in Tehran on Wednesday, according to Press TV, as officials and mourners gathered to honour the two figures.
Larijani had been one of Iran’s most influential political operators, having previously led its nuclear negotiations with the West and served as speaker of parliament.
In an interview with Al Jazeera aired after the killing of Larijani was confirmed by Tehran on Tuesday, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the United States and Israel had yet to realise that Iran’s government does not rely on a single individual.