TEHRAN / WASH­IN­GTON: Before Iran could bury Ali Larijani, Israel assassinated its intelligence chief as well, declaring that its forces could target any senior Iranian official “without the need for additional approval”.

Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib was reportedly slain amid a massive onslaught, that leveled parts of the Iranian capital, ahead of a massive public funeral for Larijani and the sailors killed in a US sneak attack on an Iranian ship in international waters.

Thousands and thousands gathered at Tehran’s Enquilab Square, waving Iranian flags and carrying portraits of the dead.

Iranian President Mas­oud Pezeshkian confirmed the assassination. “The cowardly assassination of my dear colleagues Esmail Khatib, Ali Larijani and Aziz Nasirzadeh, along with some of their family members and members of their accompanying teams, has left us in mourning,” Pezeshkian has said in a post on X.

Iran then retaliated for the killings by firing missiles at Israel, which auth­orities said killed two people near Tel Aviv. Tehran said it fired overnight on Tel Aviv, Haifa and Beersheba in Israel, and at US bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Iran’s new supreme leader said in a written message that the killers of security chief Ali Larijani “will have to pay for it”.

“Without a doubt, the assassination of such a figure attests to his importance and to the hatred that the enemies of Islam harbour toward him,” Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei said, in a message published on his official Telegram channel on the day of Larijani’s funeral in Tehran.

“Every drop of spilled blood comes at a price, and the criminal murderers of these martyrs will soon have to pay it,” he added.

A spokesperson for Iran’s central military command, the Khatam al-Anbiya, has said that the war will continue until the “aggressors” surrender, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reports.

“The situation is this: some people have lost track of their days and nights!” the spokesperson is quoted as having said. “Their days have turned into nights by taking shelter in bunkers, and their nights have lost all peace upon seeing the bright sky of our assaults.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi also warned that the international order is experiencing a “calculated moral collapse”, where those who are supposed to defend it instead violate it with impunity.

The statement came after US President Donald Trump suggested “finishing off” what is left of the “Iranian Terror State” and urged countries relying on the Strait of Hormuz to take responsibility, criticising “non-responsive” allies.

In a statement on X, Tehran’s top diplomat gave the example of an Iranian president presenting foreign ambassadors with a “kill list” including the US president, top American generals and members of the US Congress.

“Within hours, the world would erupt. Emergency UN Security Council sessions. Relentless media hysteria. Sanctions, threats, perhaps even war — wrapped neatly in the language of ‘international law’ and defending the ‘global order’,” Araghchi has said, noting that the usual rules of the game do not seem to apply to Israel.

“What is unfolding before our eyes is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy implies shame. This is something colder: a calculated moral collapse — where rules exist only for adversaries, and impunity is reserved for allies.”

Araghchi added that Israel is dragging Washington “into an ever-deeper moral and political abyss” and that it has no regard for the repercussions of normalising its “heinous methods of terror”.

“But the international community should not disregard that recklessness; as for every action there will inevitably and always be a reaction,” he adds.

Meanwhile, The US military’s Central Command said it had struck more than 7,800 targets and damaged or destroyed more than 120 Iranian vessels.

Separately, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed that a structure 350 meters from Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant reactor was hit and destroyed.

There was no damage to the reactor itself nor injuries to staff, Director General of the IAEA Rafael Grossi said.

Published in Dawn, March 19th, 2026