On the night of March 16, 2026, the Israeli Air Force launched a series of targeted strikes across Tehran. By Tuesday morning, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz confirmed that Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and the man widely regarded as the de facto leader of the Islamic Republic since the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28, had been killed in a safehouse near Tehran.

In a separate strike the same night, the Israeli military confirmed the killing of Gholamreza Soleimani, commander of the Basij paramilitary militia, along with his deputy Seyyed Karishi and several other top Basij officers. Soleimani and his team were struck in a makeshift tent camp they had recently set up near the capital, after many of their fixed headquarters were destroyed by Israel over the previous two weeks. The head of the IRGC’s Aerospace Force was also killed overnight.

Iran has not confirmed any of it. A handwritten note attributed to Larijani was published on state media hours after the announcement, mourning Iranian sailors killed in a recent U.S. attack. No one could verify when the note was written. No one could verify if Larijani wrote it. A senior Israeli official told the Jerusalem Post: “There was no chance he survived this attack.”

The man who held it together

Ali Larijani was not a general. He was something more dangerous to lose. He was the institutional memory of the Islamic Republic.

Former IRGC commander. Speaker of Iran’s parliament for twelve years. Chief nuclear negotiator between 2005 and 2007. Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. Close adviser and right-hand man to Khamenei for decades. When the supreme leader was killed on February 28 along with approximately 40 senior officials, it was Larijani who stepped forward.

On March 1, he announced he would lead an interim committee to run the country. While Mojtaba Khamenei was technically appointed as the new supreme leader on March 8, Israeli and American intelligence have reported that Mojtaba is badly wounded and has made no public appearances. Larijani was the one running day-to-day security affairs. He was the one responding to Trump’s threats. On March 10, he issued a veiled warning to the American president: “Iran doesn’t fear your empty threats. Even those bigger than you couldn’t eliminate Iran. Be careful not to get eliminated yourself.”

Last Friday, March 14, Larijani walked through the streets of Tehran in the Quds Day rally. Defiant. Visible. Public. Three days later, a missile found him in a safehouse near the capital.

Something happened between Friday and Monday night. Someone tracked where he went after the rally. Someone reported where he was hiding. Someone connected the dots.

Larijani’s death is not an isolated event. It is the latest entry in a campaign of systematic decapitation that has no modern precedent in its speed and depth.

On the opening night of the Twelve-Day War in June 2025, Israel killed 30 Iranian generals in minutes and nine nuclear scientists in coordinated strikes. By the end of the war, the total reached almost 20 scientists and hundreds of military personnel. The operation was so precisely timed that it earned the name Operation Red Wedding.

On February 28, 2026, in the first hours of the current war, Israeli strikes killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter. Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh, IRGC commander Mohammad Pakpour, Defense Council secretary Ali Shamkhani, and four top Ministry of Intelligence officials were also eliminated. CBS News reported that approximately 40 Iranian officials were killed.

Now Larijani. Soleimani. The Basij leadership. The Aerospace Force chief. By the Israeli military’s own estimate, between 3,000 and 4,000 Iranian soldiers and commanders have been killed since February 28. The Hengaw Organization for Human Rights puts the figure at over 4,400.

Each time Iran rebuilds its chain of command, Israel cuts the new head. The replacements are less experienced, less connected, and more vulnerable than their predecessors. Ahmad Vahidi, the new IRGC chief appointed on March 1, was the Interior Minister two years ago. He became IRGC deputy chief only in December 2025. Most of Iran’s current top leaders were recent appointees themselves, promoted to fill the vacancies left by the Twelve-Day War. Now they are being killed too.

The question that matters is not whether Israel killed Larijani. The question is how Israel knew where he was.

In September 2025, Israeli Channel 13 reported that the Mossad deployed over 100 foreign operatives inside Iran during the Twelve-Day War, the largest mission in the agency’s history. The Mossad had smuggled precision weapons into the country and established a covert drone base near Tehran. These assets were used to disable Iran’s air defense systems, securing air superiority for Israeli aircraft in the first hours of the conflict. A former Mossad director of research described it as “the culmination of extensive efforts aimed at undermining Iran’s nuclear initiative.”

The scale of infiltration is confirmed by Iran’s own response. By August 2025, Iranian police had detained 21,000 suspects, including 260 accused of espionage and 172 for illegal filming. Several Kurdish men were charged with espionage and publicly executed. The arrest of 260 suspected spies in a country that believed itself to be impenetrable tells a story that the regime would prefer not to acknowledge.

And now consider the circumstances of last night’s strikes. Gholamreza Soleimani, the Basij commander, was not killed in a headquarters. He was killed in a makeshift tent camp near Tehran, erected specifically because Israel had destroyed the Basij’s fixed locations over the previous two weeks. He was operating as a fugitive within his own country. Sleeping in tents. Changing locations. And Israel found him anyway.

Satellites and signals intelligence can locate fixed installations. They can track phone signals and intercept communications. But they cannot find a man sleeping in an improvised tent in a metropolitan area of fifteen million people. That requires something else entirely.

That requires a person.

The shadow inside the regime

The operational logic leads to an inescapable  conclusion. To locate Khamenei in a bunker so deep that its elevator took more than five minutes to reach, someone had to know the precise moment he was above ground. To find Larijani three days after his public appearance at the Quds Day rally, someone had to track his movements back to his safehouse. To hit Soleimani in a tent that was erected precisely to avoid detection, someone had to know where the tent was pitched.

The profile of this intelligence source, or sources, can be deduced from the operations themselves. This is not a gardener or a bodyguard. A person with that level of access to the locations of Iran’s most protected leaders must hold significant rank within the regime. They must have the kind of position where asking about a leader’s whereabouts does not raise suspicion. And they must still be alive when those around them are being killed.

Whether the Mossad is leveraging someone through coercion or whether there is a traitor acting out of conviction is impossible to determine from the outside. Both possibilities carry historical precedent. Eli Cohen, arguably the most famous spy in Israeli history, penetrated the Syrian government in the 1960s so deeply that he was considered a candidate for Deputy Minister of Defense before being discovered and executed in 1965. The Mossad has done this before. At the highest levels. In hostile states.

What is certain is that the Iranian regime is penetrated at a depth that makes its leadership structurally vulnerable. No level of operational security, not bunkers, not safehouses, not tents, not constant relocation, has proven sufficient. And the implications of this penetration extend far beyond the killing of any single individual.

What military science says about cutting the head

The systematic elimination of a nation’s leadership during wartime is known in military doctrine as a decapitation strategy. The academic literature on its effectiveness is extensive and not unanimous, but the documented effects are consistent.

The first effect is disruption of command and control. When senior leaders are killed in rapid succession, orders stop flowing through the chain of command. Subordinate units lose clarity on who has authority to make decisions. This is already happening in Iran. Early in the war, Iran’s Foreign Ministry acknowledged that the military had lost control over several units, which were operating according to old general instructions. That is the textbook signature of a decapitated command structure.

The second effect is decision paralysis. The officers who survive face a lethal dilemma: assuming visible command makes them the next target. This generates a survival instinct that overrides the instinct to lead. Soleimani sleeping in tents instead of commanding from a headquarters is the physical manifestation of this paralysis. When a military leader hides instead of leading, the organization beneath him degrades.

The third effect is internal fracture. A strong leader holds rival factions together. When that leader is removed, suppressed rivalries emerge. Iran today has at least three potential power centers competing for control: Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader who is reportedly badly wounded and absent from public life; Ahmad Vahidi, the new IRGC chief with limited experience at the top; and President Masoud Pezeshkian, a civilian reformist with electoral legitimacy but no military authority. Larijani was the glue between these factions. With him gone, the centrifugal forces within the regime accelerate.

The fourth effect is degradation of decision quality. Each replacement is less experienced than the person they replace. The learning curve for wartime leadership is steep, and Iran’s new leaders are climbing it under bombardment. Decisions made under these conditions are more likely to be reactive, emotional, and strategically incoherent.

The fifth effect is the signal sent to the population. When a regime cannot protect its own leaders, its claim to protect its citizens collapses. The celebrations that erupted on the streets of Tehran after Khamenei’s death were not accidental. They were the visible manifestation of a population that had already calculated, consciously or not, that the regime’s grip was weakening. Every subsequent high-profile killing reinforces that calculation.

There is a risk embedded in this strategy that should concern everyone, including Israel.

A decapitated regime does not always surrender. Sometimes it lashes out. The academic literature documents cases where the elimination of experienced leadership leads not to capitulation but to desperate escalation by successors who lack the strategic judgment to calculate consequences.

In a previous article published on this blog, I analyzed the scenario in which Iran, facing existential threat, would direct its remaining missiles at the Dimona nuclear reactor in the Negev desert. Iran’s own officials threatened exactly this in the early days of the current war, warning that their “final effective missiles” would target Dimona and all energy infrastructure across the Middle East if the United States and Israel pursued regime change.

The experienced leaders who understood the catastrophic implications of such an attack, who could calculate that striking Dimona would trigger a response that would end the Islamic Republic permanently, are now dead. The people replacing them are younger, less experienced, more ideological, and operating under the psychological pressure of watching their predecessors be killed one by one.

The Mossad’s intelligence capabilities inside Iran are, by any objective assessment, extraordinary. The ability to locate and eliminate leaders who are actively hiding is a feat of espionage that will be studied for decades. But the strategic question remains: what happens when the last rational actor in Tehran is removed, and the person who replaces him has nothing left to lose?

Last Friday, Ali Larijani walked in the sun through the streets of Tehran. By Monday night, he was dead. Mojtaba Khamenei, the man I addressed in a poem published days ago on this blog, has not seen the sun since his appointment. Perhaps that is why he is still alive.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)