The IDF on Tuesday targeted a building in which the 88-member Assembly of Experts was reportedly meeting to choose Iran’s next supreme leader, Israeli sources told The Jerusalem Post.
Iranian news agencies said the structure in Qom was “flattened.” Tasnim, affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), confirmed that the Assembly’s compound in Qom had been struck, and that its building in Tehran, located at the former parliament site, was also hit overnight. A Telegram channel, Zed TV, claimed the strike targeted a formal session convened to select the Islamic Republic’s next leader, alleging members were killed or wounded.
If accurate, the strikes were aimed at the most sensitive institutional body of the Islamic Republic.
The Assembly of Experts (Majles-e Khobregan-e Rahbari) is the clerical body empowered under Iran’s constitution to appoint, supervise, and, in theory, dismiss the Supreme Leader.
The second, and last, person to fill that role was Ali Khamenei, who was killed in Israeli airstrikes on Saturday morning.
Assembly system keeps power with regime-approved clerics
The Assembly consists of 88 clerical jurists (mujtahids) elected to eight-year terms, though all candidates must first be vetted by the Guardian Council. That council is itself half appointed directly by the Supreme Leader and half indirectly under his influence. The system ensures that only regime-approved clerics reach the ballot.
In 2016, 801 applied to run, and just 166 were approved. Reformists and independent figures are routinely excluded. While members are elected by public vote, the range of choice is tightly controlled.
Under Articles 107 and 111 of the Islamic Republic Constitution, the Assembly must appoint a new leader “within the shortest possible time” upon death, resignation, or dismissal. It is also tasked with supervising the sitting leader and determining whether he still meets the required qualifications of Islamic scholarship, justice, prudence, and political capability.
In practice, that supervision has never materialized.
The Assembly has never dismissed, or even publicly questioned, a sitting Supreme Leader. Its meetings are confidential, and its reports are available only to the eyes of a select few. Over the course of Khamenei’s long, unchallenged reign, the body has evolved into what many inside and outside Iran describe as ceremonial, but Israel’s strikes have struck at that ceremonial heart of the regime.
When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died in 1989, the Assembly elevated Khamenei despite his relatively modest religious credentials at the time. A constitutional amendment later removed the requirement that the Supreme Leader be a marja’, a title given to the highest level of Twelver Shia religious cleric, smoothing his position retroactively. That episode remains the only true test of the Assembly’s authority.
The balance of power within Iranian politics has shifted steadily since then toward the security establishment, particularly the IRGC. While the constitution vests authority in clerical jurists, political reality in Tehran is shaped by military influence and, formerly, by Khamenei’s longevity and patronage.
But the Assembly of Experts still carries important meaning within Iran’s system, even symbolically. The council was meeting to appoint a successor to Khamenei just days after his death.
In Iran, religion is, in theory, the highest possible authority. The Islamic Republic was founded in 1979 on Khomeini’s doctrine of velayat-e faqih, or “guardianship of the Islamic jurist,” which combined Shiite clerical authority with the machinery of the state.
Under this principle, ultimate political legitimacy flows from God and is exercised through a senior Islamic jurist (the Supreme Leader) whose authority eclipses elected institutions and controls the armed forces and the judiciary. Khomeini’s base was the holy city of Qom, where the building was targeted, and one of Iran’s holy cities.
From there, he turned clerical networks into a governing elite that has ruled the Islamic Republic for almost five decades.
Targeting the Assembly may not be quite the same as direct hits against the IRGC or other military infrastructure in modern warfare. Nor will it lead to the dismantling of the Islamic Republic overnight. But it is a strike which disrupts the succession process, and, more symbolically, it is a psychological strike at everything the Islamic Republic stands for.