00:00Israel's defence minister says that Iran's security chief Ali Larijani is dead.
00:05Israeli media saying earlier that the military had been targeting him,
00:09adding that it was not immediately clear at that stage whether he was killed or injured.
00:13Now, Iran hasn't commented on that report,
00:16but state media has published in the last 15 minutes or so a handwritten note by the security chief.
00:23Not clear, of course, if that note was written a long time ago or recently.
00:28If his death is confirmed, though, he would be the most senior Iranian official to be killed
00:32after the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who died on the first day of the war.
00:37Well, let's go straight to Jerusalem.
00:38We're going to talk to our correspondent, Nogatana Polsky, who joins us from there.
00:41Nogatana, Israel Katz, the security defence minister, has just been speaking.
00:46Tell us what he had to say.
00:50Well, he did. He announced the killing of Ali Larijani in the context of Israel.
00:58Pursuing its aims of the war in Iran.
01:02Those aims have become murkier and murkier as the last 18 days now of war have continued.
01:11And with Israelis wondering more and more what the end point might be and whether regime change,
01:18which is what the Israeli government had really announced as its aim initially,
01:22was possible in any way, especially all the more so as we've heard doubts from the United States in recent
01:29days.
01:30Ali Larijani is an important symbolic figure and possibly important also in terms of the running of Iran.
01:37He has been considered the man de facto in charge of Iran, running Iran,
01:42certainly since the assassination of Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, back on February 28th.
01:50But possibly even before then.
01:52He's an interesting figure, Larijani.
01:55He's known for his cruelty.
01:57He was behind several years of merciless response to public protest.
02:05He was the architect of the most recent response in which tens of thousands of Iranians were killed just in
02:11January.
02:11He's also a philosopher known for, among other things, writing a book on Kant.
02:17He's also a merciless, uncompromising figure, but very much in the saddle.
02:23Unlike, as far as we know, both Ali Khamenei, who was very old and ailing,
02:30and his son, Mutschaba Khamenei, who's been appointed to replace him,
02:34but who has not been seen and about whom many, many rumors are swirling about whether he's even functional or
02:43wounded or whatever.
02:44So Larijani is an important figure.
02:46I do want to add one more detail, a kind of internal Israeli detail.
02:51In recent days, more and more questions have been asked about where this war is going from the Israeli point
02:58of view.
02:59Yesterday, in an article, in an opinion column in the paper Haaretz,
03:05Yossi Vertu, the political analyst, basically detailed Netanyahu's, Prime Minister Netanyahu's troubles in Israel,
03:13legal troubles, political troubles, even troubles explaining this Iran war to the Israeli people.
03:20And in one of the paragraphs, he says, nothing is working for Netanyahu.
03:27He's not gaining one milligram in any poll.
03:31He's not advancing.
03:32He seems unable to explain things.
03:34And he asked, this is just yesterday, he said, and who is left to assassinate?
03:38So there is a sense in Israel that assassination of these foreign leaders,
03:43certainly ones involved in repression or in Islamist Revolutionary Guard Corps terror events abroad, outside of Iran,
03:53that those are legitimate targets, as the Israeli military has said,
03:57and that that is part of the unstated aim of this war.
04:01The other point, isn't it, Nogha, is that you mentioned there, Larry Jani being very much in the saddle.
04:06The regime seems to have a very good way of, if somebody goes out of a saddle, just putting somebody
04:10else in his place.
04:13That's right.
04:14It's not obvious with Larry Jani.
04:16I'm sure that there is a deep bench of deputies for him, but I don't know them.
04:22And in fact, they have not been much publicised, even within Iran.
04:27I think we should mention that even Mujahideen, the son of this very long-time, almost four-decade-long supreme
04:34leader,
04:35was not a figure particularly well-known in Iran.
04:38The people who are coming up in the system of the Islamic Republic are kept hidden, among other things, because
04:45they're targeted.
04:45But I'm sure the IRCG is not a flimsy body, and it has shown itself to be extremely resilient, certainly
04:58since last June,
04:59when both Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that basically the military abilities of Iran had been obliterated.
05:09I'm quoting now Donald Trump.
05:11And to quote Netanyahu, he told Israelis that Iran's military threat on Israel was gone, and I quote, for generations.
05:18We see just a few months later that that is not the case, that they are rehabilitated, very much in
05:25charge.
05:25There are no signs so far of any sort of collapse in the structure of the Iranian state.
05:32And I assume that if this killing of Larry Gianni is confirmed by Iran in the next few hours,
05:40I assume that within 24 hours there will be de facto somebody running the show, even if it's not formally
05:47announced.
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