Mojtaba Khamenei Survived a Second Strike, Cleric Claims

Iran's Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei survived a second strike while being treated at a Tehran hospital this past February, a senior Iranian cleric has claimed. The fifty-six-year-old leader was pulled alive from the rubble after the medical center was hit, in an account that adds new detail to the conflicting reports about his health and whereabouts.

The claim came from Mohsen Heydari, a member of Iran's Assembly of Experts, who described the episode in an interview with the Qatari television network Al Araby. The Week reported his remarks on Saturday, saying Heydari described how Mojtaba Khamenei had already been wounded and moved to a hospital when US and Israeli forces hit medical facilities across Tehran. "Even after he had been wounded and taken to the hospital, three hospitals in Tehran were bombed," Heydari said in the interview, according to The Week. "Mojtaba Khamenei was in the third hospital and was pulled from the rubble," he added.

The hospital strike followed the February 28 operation that destroyed former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's Tehran compound, killing the eighty-six-year-old and a dozen of Iran's top leaders. The younger Khamenei, who succeeded his father, was nearly killed in that first attack and was still recovering when the hospital was hit. The Week, citing the New York Post, reported that medical centers in the capital were bombed in the days after the initial strikes. Khamenei was then moved to an unknown location and has not been seen or heard from since, according to multiple reports.

Heydari also described the secretive succession that followed. He said the Assembly of Experts' secretariat in Qom was itself bombed, killing eight people and destroying the body's official records. With its headquarters under attack, the members wrote their votes on paper and gathered in an undisclosed room, summoned without advance notice of the location. According to Business Today, which reported on the succession details, Khamenei secured fifty of fifty-nine votes, with most of the rest going to Ayatollah Alireza Arafi.

The Assembly of Experts is the constitutional body charged with choosing Iran's supreme leader, which is why its secretariat was hit as well. That the vote happened at all under bombardment, with members summoned to a room whose location they were not given in advance, shows how thoroughly the normal machinery of the Islamic Republic was disrupted by the February campaign. For Mojtaba Khamenei, the vote was also a loyalty test: Heydari said he put the younger Khamenei's name forward specifically to defy Washington, which had made clear it did not want him in the job.

The succession vote held under bombardment

Heydari said the assembly moved ahead with the vote only after receiving reports that Mojtaba Khamenei was physically able to lead, and that the new leader had no idea he had been chosen until the announcement aired on Iranian state television. Under the country's system, the cleric said, Khamenei was then legally and religiously obligated to accept the post. Heydari added that he had personally put the younger Khamenei's name forward as an act of defiance against the United States, whose president had objected to the choice.

Conflicting accounts of his condition

What happened to Mojtaba Khamenei after the rescue remains disputed. US intelligence assessments have suggested he was left severely disfigured by the initial strikes, and last month President Trump told US commentator Glenn Beck that he believed the Iranian leader was alive but badly hurt. "I don't think he's dead," Trump said, per The Statesman. "He was very seriously wounded. The left side of his body, the arm, the leg, the whole thing." Iran's president, Masoud Pezeshkian, offered a sharply different version this week, telling Fox News that Khamenei was "completely" healthy and that the two had spoken for about seven hours roughly a month earlier, according to The Statesman.

The story has traveled fast. ABP Live's Monday morning bulletin listed the cleric's claim about Mojtaba Khamenei among its top headlines of the day, and versions of the account ran across Indian outlets including NDTV, The Week, Business Today, and The Statesman. That spread matters because so little is independently verifiable: Tehran has not produced its supreme leader on camera or in audio since the strikes, and Trump's and Pezeshkian's accounts of his condition cannot both be true.

The new account about Mojtaba Khamenei arrives as mediators continue separate talks with Washington and Tehran aimed at ending the fighting and reopening the Strait of Hormuz, according to the News Watchman daily brief published Monday. The episode also fits a pattern of escalating strikes on leadership targets that has defined the conflict: earlier this month, Trump used his UN General Assembly speech to threaten Iran, and the fight over the waterway has already derailed one ceasefire effort, as the Trump Strait map story showed. For the region, the human cost keeps climbing, with Gaza's death toll passing seventy-four thousand. NDTV, which also reported the cleric's account, noted that the younger Khamenei has not appeared in public, even on camera, since the conflict intensified.