Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei drew his last, likely choked, breath on Saturday, but the seeds of his demise in a joint Israeli-American strike were planted years earlier and far from his Tehran headquarters.
The processes that led to his violent death can be traced back to October 7, 2023, when the Hamas terror group set off a chain of events that would, through a series of twists and turns, lead to Israel and the US launching a war aimed at eliminating the Iranian regime he led for decades.
One can also peer back further, to a decision made by Khamenei nearly a decade ago to embrace Hamas and boost its capabilities. That decision, part of his decades-long project to build up a network of well-armed proxy forces across the Middle East, might well have been the beginning of the end of the Islamic Republic.
At the time, Khamenei boasted a web of Shiite groups in Iraq, Lebanon, and beyond that tended to act as unswervingly loyal foot soldiers to the cause he had led since 1989.
But Sunni Hamas had been asserting its independence.
Read the full article at Times of Israel.
Published originally on March 2, 2026.
