Thursday June 19, 2025|
By Idorenyin UMOREN
Security Evaluator
The Israeli Defense Minister, Israel Katz, on Thursday, June 19, directly threatened to assassinate Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in response to Iranian ballistic missiles striking Beersheba’s Soroka Medical Center, according to The Jerusalem Post reports.
“Khamenei will pay for his crimes,” he said.
The defense minister added that Israel will now start attacking new kinds of strategic targets in Iran “to remove the threats hanging over the State of Israel and to shake the ayatollah’s regime.”
It was not clear whether this meant the government has now given the order to actually kill Khamenei, with United States, US President Donald Trump so far wanting to hold off on such a measure to still try to reach some kind of a deal with the regime.
Or, whether Katz was simply raising the level of rhetoric to the threshold of being ready to assassinate Khamenei and giving him a last chance to cut a deal with President Trump, while still leaving some amount of time for that kind of diplomacy.
Likewise, while the threat to “shake” the regime was an escalation of rhetoric closer to regime change, most experts do not believe Israel has sufficient military power to topple Iran’s regime the way it has Hamas’s regime in Gaza.