Stop the count: Israel levels building where clerics gathered to select Iran’s new supreme leader

“They can find a substitute for most officials, but not for Khamenei.”

By Adam Kredo, The Washington Free Beacon

Israeli forces “flattened” a building where Iran’s 88-member Assembly of Experts had gathered to select the regime’s next supreme leader, according to Israeli officials and regional reports.

“We wanted to prevent them from picking a new supreme leader,” an Israeli defense official told Axios shortly after pinpoint strikes leveled the building. Video posted on X showed rubble where the building once stood.

The attack came as the powerful regime body was counting votes, hoping to select a supreme leader to replace Ali Khamenei after his death during the opening salvo of the U.S.-Israeli operation against the Iranian regime.

The assembly claimed just hours earlier that it “won’t take long” to select a successor, though that process is likely at a standstill in the wake of Israel’s operation.

While it remains unclear how many Iranian leaders were in the building and how many regime officials the strike killed, Fox News reported that “multiple Iranian officials responsible for counting the votes of the Supreme Council were killed,” while Israeli journalist Amit Segal said “the council secretary was killed and the ballot box was burned” in the strike.

It is elected by the Iranian people every eight years and consists of a leadership board and six committees.

It has presided over just one leadership transition since 1989, when Khamenei was elevated to the position of supreme leader. Its current chair is the 94-year-old Ayatollah Mohammad-Ali Movahedi Kermani.

Alongside him serve two deputy chairmen, Ayatollahs Hashem Hosseini Bushehri and Alireza Arafi, the latter of whom also sits on the interim leadership council formed in the wake of Khamenei’s death.

Arafi is seen as a hardliner who used his position on the country’s Supreme Council for Cultural Revolution to crack down on reformists, a potential successor to Khamenei, and a powerful figure in the late supreme leader’s absence.

Israel’s interest in the Assembly of Experts suggests that it remains focused on eradicating Tehran’s senior leadership, preventing them from coalescing around a new ayatollah who could bring some level of stability amid ongoing war operations.

Khamenei’s death created a significant power vacuum at the top of Tehran’s leadership, leaving local security forces to operate without clear directions.

“They can find a substitute for most officials, but not for Khamenei,” Elliott Abrams, who served as the U.S. Iran envoy during Trump’s first term, told the Washington Free Beacon earlier on Tuesday.

“Whoever succeeds him will not truly be supreme leader, able to give unquestioned instructions to the Army and IRGC. He will be a far smaller figure, politically and spiritually. There may not be ‘regime change’ this week, but the regime has been changed, and very deeply.”