Iran’s top diplomat has offered one of the clearest accounts yet of the strike that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, giving analysts fresh evidence of the precision behind the joint U.S.-Israeli operation that launched Operation Epic Fury.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi revealed new details in a television interview, describing how the strike hit one section of Khamenei’s compound while leaving another wing intact.
Counterterrorism experts said the account shows the operation was not a blunt attack meant to level the entire site. It was a targeted decapitation strike aimed at the heart of Iran’s regime.
“Well, the building we were sitting in was targeted, but the wing we were in remained intact while the other wing of the building was destroyed,” Araghchi said in an interview that aired June 4 on the Lebanon-based, Hezbollah-backed Al Mayadeen television network.
Araghchi survived the Feb. 28 strike because he was in a different wing of Khamenei’s compound when the attack occurred.
He also described how Khamenei was in his office at the time and how others inside the complex survived.
Dr. Omar Mohammed, a counterterrorism expert, said Araghchi’s account confirms the strike was aimed at a specific section of the compound rather than the entire building.
“In the Arabic version, Araghchi says he was in a different wing of the compound, briefing another official, and his wing survived while the leader’s office was destroyed,” Mohammed explained.
Araghchi also said he had an appointment that day at the compound with an official regarding the Geneva negotiations. Based on the usual workflow, he said Khamenei “had to be present in his office.”
Mohammed, director of the Antisemitism Research Initiative at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, said the comments amounted to a glaring acknowledgment of American and Israeli capabilities.
“They did not flatten a building; they took one wing and left the one next to it standing. That is President Trump’s whole doctrine in a single strike — he does not want a war of occupation, he wants to show the United States can reach the center of a hostile regime with precision and then offer it a way out,” Mohammed said.
U.S. Almost KILLS Iran’s FM Dr. Abbas Araghchi
Araghchi Says He Was Beside Khamenei When the Strike Hit
He had come to the Supreme Leader’s office at 9 a.m. that Saturday to deliver his report on the Geneva talks, telling the leader the atmosphere had made war far more… pic.twitter.com/1gvVYDUS3Q
— Ryan Rozbiani (@RyanRozbiani) June 4, 2026
The daylight strike on Khamenei’s compound was carried out by Israeli jets using 30 precision munitions alongside Sparrow air-launched ballistic missiles.
Military officials confirmed that the strike killed Khamenei, 86, along with Defense Minister Amir Nasirzadeh, IRGC Commander Mohammed Pakpour and multiple senior security officials.
Trump confirmed U.S. involvement in Khamenei’s killing in a social media post at the time.
“He was unable to avoid our intelligence and highly sophisticated tracking systems, and, working closely with Israel, there was not a thing he or the other leaders killed alongside him could do,” the president wrote.
Mohammed said the strike delivered a message Tehran should have understood immediately.
“Iran was handed the clearest message an adversary can get — we can reach your leader in his own office, and here is the off-ramp,” Mohammed noted. “A rational state takes the exit. Tehran did the opposite. It fired on Israel, killed a civilian in Bahrain, struck Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, and closed the Strait of Hormuz, setting off a global energy crisis. The surgical strike was American. The months-long war that followed was Iran’s choice.”
After Khamenei’s death, his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, became Iran’s new supreme leader.
He has since been involved in back-channel talks with the U.S. while publicly maintaining a hard-line posture.
Mohammed said Araghchi’s language about the transition was revealing.
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“In Arabic, Araghchi calls the new leader ‘the young Khamenei in place of the elderly Khamenei.’ That is the language of a monarchy, not a republic of clerics,” Mohammed observed. “They are rewriting the theology on air to fit a son who lacks the religious rank, who was wounded in the same strike and who then vanished for weeks. A revolution that came to power by ending a monarchy is handing the throne from father to son.”
The strike and its aftermath have become a defining example of Donald Trump’s national security approach, according to analysts: hit a hostile regime with overwhelming precision, then give it a chance to step back from the brink.
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Iran, they argue, chose the opposite path.
“The real story is not that Iran is strong,” Mohammed continued. “It was shown the precision of American power and the door was held open, and it chose to widen the war instead.”
Araghchi’s own account now appears to back up what U.S. and Israeli officials have said for months: the strike was not random destruction. It was a carefully aimed operation that reached directly into the center of Iran’s ruling structure.
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