News that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been eliminated in a joint US-Israeli operation is more than the removal of a man.
It is a rupture in a system that for decades fused repression at home with aggression abroad.
Under his rule, the Islamic Republic crushed dissent, policed women, looted national wealth, and redirected Iran’s talent and resources into missiles, militias, and terror, leaving ordinary Iranians poorer, freer in name only, and constantly threatened.
Beyond Iran’s borders, the regime treated chaos as leverage, building proxy networks to intimidate neighbours, derail peace, arm Russia with suicide drones and missiles to attack Ukraine, and target Jews and Israelis far from the region.
Israel has warned for years that this was not rhetoric but strategy, and that diplomacy was too often exploited to buy time.
Khamenei’s death will not automatically dismantle the machinery he led. Yet the myth of invulnerability has been punctured.
We will never forget that Khamenei’s dictatorship nurtured, armed and financed the machinery of terror that enabled the atrocities of 7 October 2023, the deadliest massacre of Jewish life since the Holocaust.
From Tehran, the Supreme Leader pulled the levers of violence through a proxy network of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and others, using them to destabilise the region and target Israelis and Jews far beyond it, all while remaining openly committed to the destruction of Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.
In recent years, the regime accelerated its most dangerous ambitions: embedding military and nuclear infrastructure, alongside ballistic missile production programmes, deep underground to frustrate detection and enter a zone of immunity.
At the same time, it engaged in hollow diplomacy not as a path to peace, but as a tactic to buy time, time to move closer to an operational capability that would have allowed them to produce 11 nuclear bombs, threatening not only Israel, but the wider Middle East and the West. In that context, the decisive action taken by the United States and Israel was not optional; it was urgently necessary to remove a growing threat to us all.
While Khamenei and his inner circle gathered to tighten their grip and map out the next phase of repression, Operation Roaring Lion was already under way, with a clear purpose: to permanently illuminate the existential threats from the Islamic regime including degrading and preventing Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes before they could be hidden behind a veil of cover and immunity deep under the Iranian soil.
Iran’s response to the joint US-Israeli strikes has been telling: lashing out at our Gulf partners and even reaching a UK military base in Cyprus. That is precisely the point. This regime does not merely menace Israel; it threatens the wider region and beyond, and it would have possessed still broader reach had it been allowed to keep expanding its arsenal unchecked. But this is not only about deterrence; it is also about possibility.
By degrading the regime’s coercive capabilities and disrupting its machinery of aggression, the operation can help create conditions in which the people of the Middle East, who have endured decades of violence, intimidation and proxy warfare, fuelled by Iran’s revolution can reclaim their future from a blood-stained dictatorship that has trampled civil liberties at home and exported instability across the region.
A future that expands the Abraham Accords is a real possibility, and one we can’t overlook. This will create the stability and prosperity many of our regional partners are seeking so desperately.
Israelis are bracing for another round of this war with a clarity forged over years of living under threat: families marked Purim in shelters, homes have been stocked with water and essentials, and safe rooms have been retrofitted with radios, chargers and even Wi-Fi, not out of bravado, but out of sober readiness for the long haul.
That resilience is not an end in itself; it is the price of pursuing something larger than survival: a real chance to eliminate an existential threat to be safe and secure in our homeland and shift the Middle East away from proxy wars and permanent instability and towards a safer, more normal future, one that will also be felt in Britain and across the world.
Moments like this are rare in the region’s history and they are easily squandered by ideological pettiness, factional point-scoring and the temptation to retreat into cynicism. If there is any lesson from the decades behind us, it is that divided democracies invite escalation, while unity can deter it. This is the time to stand together, for the people of the Middle East, who deserve a future defined by dignity rather than fear.
Daniela Grudsky Ekstein is Israel’s acting ambassador to the UK
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