News that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in joint airstrikes by Israel and the United States sent shockwaves through the world.
The development came after months of tension between Iran, Israel and the United States, with US President Donald Trump making repeated threats to strike Iran.
Khamenei and several members of his family were killed in the airstrikes, including his wife, Mansoureh Khojasteh Bagherzadeh, who succumbed to her injuries after spending the past few days in a coma. Now, news is emerging about how Israel hacked Tehran’s traffic cameras to track Khamenei.
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But what do we know about the operation?
Let’s take a closer look.
Mossad’s long-term surveillance operation
According to a piece in the _Financial Times,_ the operation was conducted by Israel’s spy agency, Mossad. The newspaper quoted two people in the know as saying that Mossad hacked into Iran’s traffic cameras to track Khamenei and other senior Iranian officials.
The people in the know said that the cameras in Tehran had been hacked for years. The cameras, ironically, are part of the regime’s surveillance apparatus, which it uses to crack down on citizens and protesters. Sources told the outlet that the traffic footage from Tehran was scrambled and uploaded to servers in Tel Aviv and southern Israel.
The report claimed that one
camera angle in particular was especially important. This is because it showed where the bodyguards and drivers of the late Ayatollah parked their personal cars. It also provided insight into the daily routines in the compound near Tehran’s Pasteur Street — what time they arrived and left and whom they escorted.
CNN quoted US and Israeli intelligence officials as saying they had intricately mapped out Khamenei’s daily life, including “where he lived, whom he met with, how he communicated and where he might retreat under threat of attack.”
Israel’s Major-General Gofman will replace the current Head of the Mossad, David Barnea, who will conclude his five-year tenure in June 2026. Image/Prime Minister’s Spokesperson’s Office, Israel
The data was then fed into complex algorithms which configured what intelligence officials described as a “pattern of life”. This included addresses, work schedules and, crucially, which senior officials were being protected and transported.
The surveillance stream was simply one among hundreds sending information back to Israel’s intelligence system, which merged information from Unit 8200, spies recruited by Mossad and large-scale data analysis from military intelligence.
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“We knew Tehran like we know Jerusalem,” an Israeli intelligence official told the Financial Times. “And when you know [a place] as well as you know the street you grew up on, you notice a single thing that’s out of place.”
The meeting that triggered the strike
According to _CNN_, the intelligence determined that top Iranian officials, including Khamenei, were to meet on Saturday morning at separate sites within a Tehran compound housing the offices of the Supreme Leader, the presidency and the national security apparatus.
According to the Financial Times, the US and Israel decided to carry out the strike when they concluded that Khamenei would be at a Saturday morning meeting at his compound. They said the chance to take out Khamenei was “unusually favourable.”
Two people in the know told the outlet that human intelligence confirmed that the meeting was on — which met the threshold needed to carry out an operation on such a high-profile target.
An Israeli youth carries the country’s flag. Reuters
_CNN_ reported that the initial idea was to carry out airstrikes on the compound at night. However, this was later changed to around 6 am local time in Israel.
According to the Financial Times, Israeli aircraft fired over two dozen precision munitions after being in the air for hours. The Israeli military has said that the fact that the strike was carried out in broad daylight created an element of tactical surprise, despite Iran being on high alert and the compound being equipped with Sparrow missiles.
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The newspaper also said that the intelligence agencies jammed mobile phone service on Tehran’s Pasteur Street. This ensured that anyone trying to tip off senior officials within the regime in advance of the airstrike would be thwarted.
Decades in the making
Experts have said that the operation has been decades in the making. Former Mossad official Sima Shine told the Financial Times that Israel first began focusing on Iran after an order from then-prime minister Ariel Sharon to intelligence chief Meir Dagan to make the Islamic Republic a priority in 2001.
An unnamed Israeli military official has said that the airstrikes hit three targets within 60 seconds, killing Iran’s Supreme Leader and around 40 senior officials, including the chief of the Revolutionary Guard.
The US and Israeli air war against Iran, launched on Saturday, widened on Monday as Israel attacked Lebanon in response to strikes by Hezbollah, and Tehran kept up its missile and drone attacks on Gulf states that host US military bases.
A grandson of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the late founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, is likely to figure prominently in the deliberations of the clerics who will determine who replaces Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as Supreme Leader.
Hassan Khomeini is the most visible of the founder’s 15 grandchildren and is seen as a relative moderate within Iran’s clerical establishment. He enjoys close ties to reformists, including former presidents Mohammed Khatami and Hassan Rouhani, both of whom pursued policies of engagement with the West while in office.
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With inputs from agencies
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