He is the son of assassinated Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
President Donald Trump announced "major combat operations" against Iran on Feb. 28, with massive joint U.S.-Israel strikes attack targeting military and government sites, officials said.
Iranian state television confirmed that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was among those killed by airstrikes in Tehran on the first day of strikes. His successor is yet to be named.
Iran is responding to the operation with missile and drone attacks targeting Israel, regional U.S. bases and multiple Gulf nations. Israel is also intensifying its long-running strike campaign against the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon.
(Read previous Iran live updates here.)
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At least 940 people have been reported killed in Iran, with 174 cities across the country affected by the conflict so far, a spokesperson for the Iranian Red Crescent Society told Iran's semiofficial SNN news agency.
"The evidence in front of us since the 12-day war was that Iran had no intention of actually negotiating a nuclear deal that truly meant they did not have a pathway to the nuclear bomb," Defense Secretary Hegseth said at the Pentagon briefing.
Hegseth said that negotiators Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff "poured into that negotiation, giving them every single possible opportunity to release that that ambition, and they didn't. And the intelligence that we saw [showed] they didn't intend to do it in good faith – that they had the intentions eventually to get to a place where they could have that a conventional shield to block their nuclear capabilities.”
-ABC News Steve Beynon
The Israel Defense Forces said its fighter jets targeted and dismantled the Iranian regime's defense and detection systems at the Mehrabad International Airport in the capital of Tehran.
At a briefing at the Pentagon on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said "this is not a 'mission accomplished' situation," instead calling it "a reality check."
Hegseth said that now that both Israel and the U.S. have achieved dominance over the skies of Iran, those operations will be ramped up, shifting from mainly missile strikes in the first days to bomb drops.
“Flying over Tehran, flying over Iran, flying over their capital, flying over the IRGC, Iranian leaders looking up and seeing only us and Israeli air power every minute of every day, until we decide it's over and Iran will be able to do nothing about it,” he said.
“More bombers and more fighters are arriving just today, and now with complete control of the skies, we will be using 500-pound, 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound GPS and laser-guided precision gravity bombs, of which we have a nearly unlimited stockpile," Hegseth said.
“The terms of this war will be set by us at every step,” he said.
Hegseth said additional forces are arriving in the Middle East on Wednesday. CENTCOM on Tuesday night announced 50,000 troops are in the region.
“More and larger waves are coming, we are just getting started," he said.
-ABC News' Luis Martinez
