Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

In the nearly 40 years he was in power, Khamanei was responsible, through proxies such as Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas, for the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Jews worldwide.

There is no question that the primary thrust of Trump's decision to attack Iran was his belief of the need to remove it as a nuclear threat and as a general threat within the Middle East.

To grasp the magnitude of this moment, one must see it not as an isolated shock but as the culmination of a decades-long political experiment.

In a phone call interview, Trump told The Atlantic that he agreed to speak with Iranian representatives, but declined to specify whether a conversation would take place on Sunday or Monday.

"In accordance with Article 111 of the Constitution, the Temporary Leadership Council has begun its work today," Pezeshkian said in the recorded statement.

"Yesterday, we eliminated the dictator Khamenei. Together with him, we eliminated dozens of senior officials of the oppressive regime," Netanyahu said.

The American and Israeli strikes “should have even happened earlier, last month, after what the regime did to the protesters,” a member of the Iranian diaspora asserted.

Calling the Iranians a “paper tiger,” Asulin, a scholar at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA), said that the opening strike “was a lethal opening blow."

The Post understands that much of the current conventional narrative is revisionist history to try to simplify what was an extraordinarily period of uncertainty and a complex series of ups and downs.

The killing of Khamenei closes the chapter on one of the most consequential and destructive figures in modern Middle Eastern history.