Tehran nears decision on Ali Khamenei replacement as Trump says no negotiations
Maya Gebeily And Nandita Bose
Updated ,first published
Jerusalem/Dubai: Iranian state television announced that the late religious leader’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has been selected as his successor.
“Khamenei’s name will continue,” Ayatollah Hosseinali Eshkevari, a member of the religious council responsible for choosing the new leader, said in a video previously published in Iranian media.
Earlier, Mehr news agency reported that Iran’s Assembly of Experts reached a majority consensus on the successor to the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in his compound in Tehran on the first day of the war.
US President Donald Trump said on Sunday that Washington should have a say in the election. “If he doesn’t get approval from us, he won’t be able to stay in office for long,” he told ABC News.
Meanwhile, Israel confirmed that a hotel in central Beirut was attacked on Sunday and five senior commanders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) were killed while “hiding in a civilian hotel”. The Lebanese Ministry of Health said 10 people were injured in the attack.
Israel said the commanders served in the Lebanese and Palestinian units of the Guard Quds Force and were involved in providing financing, armament and intelligence to Hezbollah and Hamas. Last week, the Israeli army announced that the Quds Force killed the acting commander of the Lebanon Corps in an airstrike in Tehran.
The Quds Force works extensively with Iran’s allied militant groups in the region.
Israel also said Iran attacked missile sites, command centers and fuel depots over the weekend, while neighboring Bahrain said the Iranian attack damaged one of its desalination plants.
An Israeli attack on an oil storage facility on Saturday resulted in pillars of fire visible as a flash in Tehran’s night sky in Associated Press video. It seems that a civilian industrial facility was targeted for the first time in the war.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that the US airstrike damaged Iran’s desalination plant on Qeshm Island, warning that by doing so “the US set this precedent, not Iran”.
Desalination plants are critical to drinking water supplies in the Gulf’s arid deserts.
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates also reported Iranian drone attacks on their countries over the weekend and a large fire broke out in a government building block in Kuwait.
The explosion at the US embassy in Norway’s capital Oslo also caused minor damage early Sunday, but no injuries were reported, police said. It is not yet clear what caused the explosion and who was involved.
As fighting spread, Israel warned Lebanon of a “very heavy price” if it did not rein in militants from Iran’s ally Hezbollah, hitting the group’s strongholds with airstrikes and launching a deadly airstrike in the east.
The number of deaths in Israeli attacks on Lebanon since Monday has risen to 300.
The conflict has shaken global markets, disrupted air travel and weakened Iran’s leadership amid hundreds of Israeli and American airstrikes. On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised “many surprises” for the next phase of the conflict.
Israel said it continued to target senior Iranian figures, including Abolkasem Babayan, the recently appointed head of the religious leader’s military office who was killed in an attack on Saturday.
Trump has said he is not interested in negotiating with Iran and has raised the possibility that the Iran war will end only if Tehran no longer has a functioning military or leadership left in power.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump said, “I don’t think at some point there will be anyone left to say, ‘We surrender.'”
Trump blames Iran for school strike
Trump also blamed Tehran, without providing any evidence, for an airstrike on a girls’ school in Iran last week that killed more than 165 people, most of them children.
This despite satellite imagery, expert analysis, a US official and public information released by the American and Israeli militaries suggesting that the explosion was likely caused by US airstrikes that also hit a nearby compound affiliated with the regime’s Revolutionary Guard.
“No, in my opinion, from what I’ve seen, this was done by Iran,” Trump told reporters.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, standing behind Trump on Air Force One, said the matter was still under investigation.
Trump then intervened. “We think this was done by Iran because, as you know, they are very wrong with the munitions,” he said. “There is no truth to it whatsoever. Iran did this.”
The news site reported that the United States and Israel are discussing sending special forces to Iran to secure its stockpile of highly enriched uranium at a later stage of the war. axios It was reported citing four people with knowledge of the discussions.
Asked Saturday about the possibility of sending ground troops to secure nuclear facilities, Trump said that was something they could do “later.”
According to Iran’s UN Ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani, the US-Israeli strikes have killed at least 1,332 Iranian civilians and injured thousands more.
10 people lost their lives in Iran’s attacks in Israel. At least six US soldiers were also killed as Iran announced Sunday that it had struck US bases in Kuwait. The remains of American soldiers arrived at an air base in Delaware on Saturday.
Reuters, AP and staff reporter
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