Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is presumed dead after the US-Israeli attack, sources said.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is believed to have died after his death major military operations by the US and Israel On Saturday, multiple Israeli official sources and a US intelligence official told CBS News.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said earlier on Saturday there were “growing signs” that Khamenei had “gone” behind the campaign.

People are cheering on the streets of Tehran, according to a CBS News producer in Tehran. But state media in Tehran have never confirmed Khamenei’s death, nor has the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

An Israeli broadcaster said on Saturday that Netanyahu was shown a photo of Khamenei’s body.

The Israel Defense Forces said at a press conference on Saturday that seven Iranian officers and commanders were killed, including Ali Shamkhani, an adviser to Khamenei.

Khamenei, 86, has been Iran’s supreme leader since 1989, succeeding the leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Khamenei controlled all branches of government and the military and was considered a spiritual leader. It is not clear who will replace him.

In Iran’s ruling elite, Khamenei had no one to answer to except God. However, at work, he was a hostage of the powerful and competing political parties of his nation. On the contrary, he managed to keep them loyal for more than three decades – and they helped him implement an Islamic state that the majority of Iranians no longer wanted.

The ayatollah supported a brutal suppression of political dissent and turned a blind eye to corruption and abuse among those he trusted, especially the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

“There is corruption throughout the system,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at London’s Chatham House, speaking to CBS News before the Iranian leader’s death. He described Khamenei as “a bit of a pragmatist,” a person who “understands the distribution of power, and that for this system to survive, it needs to be honest and it needs loyalists.”

Born in the northern city of Mashhad, Khamenei was the second of eight children. He was educated at various Islamic institutes, and as a young man studied under the man who would become Iran’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini.

In 1979, like many clerics, he joined the Islamic Revolution that overthrew the pro-Western regime of Iran’s royal family. Inducted into the ruling party, he served briefly as deputy defense minister of the Islamic Republic and twice as president of Iran between 1981 and 1989.

On 4 June 1989, following the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, Khamenei was elected by the country’s powerful Guardian Council of 88 Muslim scholars to become the new supreme leader. That made him the supreme commander of the military and the head of the bureaucracy, the legal and judicial branches of the government, and the ultimate religious authority of Iran.

He did not have the authority of his predecessor, however, so Khamenei built a network of allies and cronies to strengthen his power, including senior officers in the Revolutionary Guard.

In his book “Reading Khamenei,” Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote that Iran’s leader “selects the organization’s high command and constantly shuffles it; he has also overseen the rapid rise of the Guard to become the most powerful political and economic center in Iran.”

In 2003, Khamenei issued a fatwa – an irrefutable religious edict – that forbade the production, stockpiling or use of weapons of mass destruction, on the grounds that it was forbidden by Islam.

But apart from avoiding such weapons in public, he has given his full support to the expansion of Iran’s nuclear program, which the world’s leaders have always maintained – unsatisfactorily – for peaceful purposes only.

Khamenei’s government has increased its stockpile of weapons-grade uranium. A US intelligence study from May 2025 said the country “probably does not produce nuclear weapons, but Iran has undertaken activities in recent years that put it in a better position to produce them, if it chooses to do so.” Netanyahu insisted that Iran was probably only months to a year away from being able to build a bomb.

Last year, Mr. Trump sought a deal with Iran to curb its nuclear program, after he pulled the US out of the 2015 deal during his first term. Those negotiations were challenging, when Mr. Trump says Iran should not be allowed to enrich uranium – a request Khamenei has rejected. Mr. Trump said Iran “must completely abandon any hope of obtaining a Nuclear Weapon.” Netanyahu has long had doubts about striking a deal with Iran.

When serious negotiations began when then-President Barack Obama took office for the first time regarding the nuclear deal, Khamenei made it clear that he was skeptical of negotiations with Western countries that he saw as unreliable, but he did not criticize the negotiations.

“I have no hope for negotiations, and they will lead nowhere,” he said in a 2014 speech. “But I’m not against them.”

Khamenei’s gnomic pronouncements were typical. They left a lot of wiggle room, so that, in any case, he would say he was right.

Only a tightly knit group of insiders with access to his guarded space knew what he was really thinking. Khamenei has never traveled outside Iran during his long reign as supreme leader, and has never given interviews.

Perhaps it was feared that public exposure would reduce his ambiguity and authority.

Khamenei came of age during a pushback against British and American influence over Iran’s vast oil reserves. He accused the US of a CIA-backed coup that overthrew Iran’s democratic government in 1953, and of supporting the dictatorship of Shah Reza Pahlavi.

In 1979, he supported students who held 52 Americans hostage for more than 444 days and, in the following decades, his dislike and distrust of the United States grew.

Nearly three decades after taking office as Iran’s supreme leader, Khamenei declared America “our nation’s number one enemy.”

In 2018, when Mr. Trump unilaterally pulled the US out of the international nuclear deal with Iran that was negotiated under his predecessor, Khamenei turned it into the moment I told you about, presenting it as proof that Washington cannot be trusted.

But many in the country would not trust him, either.

A year after the start of the nuclear deal, and in recent years, young Iranians who are deeply opposed to their country’s clerical rulers took to the streets, carrying placards with the previously unthinkable slogan: “Death to the Supreme Leader.”

“People’s sense of loyalty to the revolution and Islamic views on the revolution have declined significantly while Khamenei was the leader,” Vakil said. “At the same time, Iran’s economic power was greatly reduced, so it is clear that he lost a large amount of legitimacy with his people.”

Rather than engaging with their concerns or considering liberal reforms, however, Khamenei doubled down. He blamed the country’s sluggish economy and domestic unrest on the US and its ally Israel, and gave his tacit blessing to the violent crackdown on protests, as security forces killed some of the protesters.

In 2014, Khamenei’s office released photos of the leader in hospital recovering from prostate surgery, sparking rumors that his health was deteriorating.

But he held on for almost 12 more years – a steadfast steward of revolutionary ideas that were increasingly at odds with a modernizing Iran.