A three-day state funeral for Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei will begin on Wednesday evening at the grand mosque in Tehran.
Hojjatoleslam Mahmoudi, head of Iran’s Islamic Propagation Council, said the farewell ceremony would continue for three days and the funeral procession will be announced later.
The official said the public will be able to pay their respects to the body of late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Prayer Hall starting at 10pm (6:30pm UK time).
‘The Mosalla (prayer hall) will be receiving visitors and the dear people can attend and take part in the farewell ceremony and mark a strong presence once again,’ he said in comments carried by Iranian media.
An official 40-day mourning period, as well as a seven-day national holiday was announced in Iran in the wake of Khamenei’s death.
Khamenei, who based his iron rule of Iran on hostility to the US and Israel, was killed on Saturday, aged 86, in air strikes by Israel and the US.
He led Iran’s clerical establishment and its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard – the two main centres of power in the governing theocracy.
The funeral will be held despite ongoing strikes by the IDF, who has declared it is now carrying out a ‘broad wave’ of attacks in Tehran.
The IDF says the ‘terrorist infrastructure’ will be targeted in what it highlighted was the ‘tenth wave’ of attacks on the Iranian capital.
The Israeli military has also launched airstrikes on Beirut as it targets Hezbollah militants in the Lebanese capital.
Iran meanwhile has continued its retaliatory attacks in Israel and across the Gulf states on another night of chaos in the Middle East.
It comes as Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz threatened on Wednesday to assassinate any Iranian leader picked to succeed supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in US-Israeli strikes on Tehran.
In a post on X, Katz said: ‘Any leader selected by the Iranian terror regime to continue leading the plan for Israel’s destruction, threatening the United States, the free world and countries in the region, and suppressing the Iranian people, will be a certain target for assassination, no matter his name or where he hides.’
The Iranian regime’s 88-person assembly, who is tasked with appointing, supervising and potentially dismissing the supreme leader, met on Tuesday in Qom to find a successor to Khamenei.
However, Israeli and US strikes flattened the building where the assembly met. There was no information on any potential casualties.
Now, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been named the favourite to be appointed Iran’s new Supreme Leader.
The 56-year-old is Ali Khamenei’s second oldest son and has strong links to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and was chosen by Iran’s Assembly of Experts ‘under pressure from the Revolutionary Guards’, according to Iranian opposition outlet Iran International.
Mojtaba is not a high-ranking cleric, has never held office and does not have an official role in the regime.
But he served in the Iranian armed forces during the Iran-Iraq war and is believed to wield considerable influence behind the scenes. He has been touted as a possible successor to his father for years.
However, he was not included in a list of three senior clerics Ali Khamenei reportedly identified last year.
And his father is said to have indicated opposition to his candidacy because it would resemble the hereditary rule enacted by the US-backed Shah monarchy before it was overthrown in the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
Father-to-son succession is also viewed negatively in the Shiite Muslim clerical establishment in Iran.
But much of Iran’s top brass has been decimated in the latest conflict and Mojtaba has close ties with the powerful IRGC and the Basij volunteer paramilitary force.
US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he fears Iran’s new leader would be ‘as bad as the previous person’.
Commenting on the ‘worst case scenario’ at an Oval Office news conference, Trump said: ‘I guess the worst case would be we do this and then somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person, right? That could happen. We don’t want that to happen. It would probably be the worst.’
He added: ‘You go through this and then in five years, you realise you put somebody in who was no better. So we’d like to see somebody in there that’s going to bring it back for the people.’
However, he also expressed confidence on joint US-Israel military capabilities, saying: ‘We have them very much beaten militarily, from the military standpoint. They’re still lobbing some missiles,’ he said.
‘They won’t even be able to do that because we’re hitting all of their carriers. We’re hitting all of their missile stock … and we’re knocking out a lot.’
Meanwhile, a senior Iranian adviser to the late Ayatollah has declared there will be no negotiations with the US and the war can continue ‘as long as we want’.
Mohammad Mokhber told Iranian state television there is ‘no trust in the Americans’.
He said: ‘We have no basis for any negotiations with them: We can continue the war as long as we want.’
