Iran’s newly minted supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, sustained leg wounds in the opening shots of “Operation Roaring Lion/Epic Fury,” Iranian and Israeli officials told The New York Times on Tuesday.
State television has described Khamenei as a “wounded veteran of the Ramadan war,” but never specified his injury, the NYT report noted.
The report cited three Iranian and two Israeli officials as saying that Khamenei’s legs were hurt, but that the circumstances as well as the extent of the new supreme leader’s injuries, remained unclear.
Meanwhile, a senior Israeli official told Reuters that Khamenei was “lightly wounded.” The official cited Israeli intelligence assessments as saying that the injury could explain why the new supreme leader has refused to appear in public since the attack that killed his father on Feb. 28.
A Tehran ceremony to formally pledge allegiance to Mojtaba Khamenei on Tuesday reportedly featured a cardboard cutout of the new supreme leader, with the state-run Tehran Times reporting that “pictures of both Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his son were prominently displayed.”
Responding to the reports on Wednesday, the son of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian claimed the supreme leader was “safe and sound.”
“I heard news that Mr. Mojtaba Khamenei had been injured,” Yousef Pezeshkian, a government adviser, wrote on his Telegram channel.
“I have asked some friends who had connections. They told me that, thank God, he is safe and sound,” according to the president’s son.
The Israeli Air Force’s opening airstrike against the Islamic Republic on Feb. 28 killed “more than 40 of the most important people in Iran” in only 40 seconds, Maj. Gen. Shlomi Binder, head of the Israel Defense Forces’ Military Intelligence Directorate, revealed early in the war.
The joint Israeli-U.S. opening salvo of the campaign, which seeks to neutralize the global threat posed by the regime, eliminated Ali Khamenei and senior members of Iran’s Intelligence Ministry.
