As millions mourned Khamenei, Israel hunted the negotiators

A funeral no foreign power can ignore

Millions of Iranians are moving through Tehran, Qom, Najaf, Karbala and Mashhad this week for the state funeral of Ali Khamenei, killed in a joint US-Israeli strike on his Tehran compound on 28 February. Officials expect the procession, which runs to burial in Mashhad on 9 July, to draw 15 to 20 million mourners, the largest funeral gathering in the country’s history. Dozens of foreign governments have sent delegations. Washington and its European allies have sent none.

That absence is not incidental. It is the clearest admission available that the operation which killed Khamenei has not produced the outcome it was built to produce.

The strike, reported plainly

Khamenei, 86, died when roughly 50 aircraft and more than 100 munitions were used against his fortified compound, built 30 to 35 metres underground, in an attack that opened the wider 2026 US-Israel war on Iran. The CIA supplied targeting intelligence. Several members of his family died in the same strike. His son, Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, was severely burned and underwent multiple operations; he has not appeared in public and is not expected at his father’s funeral. An Interim Leadership Council governed under Article 111 for a week before the Assembly of Experts named Mojtaba the third supreme leader on 9 March.

These are the facts of the killing. They are reported here as facts, not as the argument of this piece.

The war Washington still cannot claim it won

By 7 April, the Human Rights Activists News Agency had documented 3,636 deaths inside Iran: 1,701 civilians, 1,221 military personnel, 714 people whose status could not be classified. Strikes hit military bases and government buildings alongside schools, hospitals and heritage sites. Arab News and PBS have reported public ceremonies for 60 of the dead, including four women and four children, names that rarely make it into the wire copy that otherwise reduces this toll to a running counter. Senior Iranian commanders killed in the campaign include IRGC commander-in-chief Hossein Salami, armed forces chief of staff Mohammad Bagheri and emergency command head Gholam Ali Rashid. Israel recorded 35 fatalities of its own, 24 of them civilians, over the same war. That is the scale of what one side inflicted and absorbed against what the other did.

A ceasefire took hold on 8 April. Trump and Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian signed a 60-day extension remotely on 17 June. Washington issued sanctions waivers on Iranian oil exports on 21 June and the Strait of Hormuz reopened without toll. None of that is what a “decisive blow” is supposed to look like five months on. It looks like a negotiated settlement with the government the strike was meant to remove.

Israel tried to kill the peace talks

The sharper fact, and the one this piece leads on, broke on 2 July when the New York Times reported that the United States had indirectly warned Iran during the peace talks that Israel might try to assassinate its own negotiating team: foreign minister Abbas Araghchi and parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. Iran’s foreign ministry confirmed the reports on 3 July.

The detail matters. As Ghalibaf returned from talks with US vice-president JD Vance in Islamabad, Iranian security detected two Israeli jets crossing into Iranian airspace from Iraq. His plane made an emergency landing in Mashhad; the delegation, including senior adviser Mahdi Mohammadi, then drove eight hours overland to Tehran rather than risk the air. Israeli officials, according to the same reporting, viewed the deal taking shape as inadequate because it delivered no regime change, no dismantling of Iran’s regional allies, and no destruction of its missile programme. Benjamin Netanyahu’s office dismissed the report as “fake news.”

Sit with what is being described. Officials sent to negotiate an end to a war were, on the account of US officials themselves, hunted mid-flight by the ally that Washington was simultaneously restraining. This is not a miscalculation. A miscalculation is an error of judgement. Sending jets after a foreign minister at the negotiating table is a decision, made by people who did not want the negotiating table to succeed.

Who is doing the learning, and who is doing the dying

The establishment framing of this war, in Washington think-tank language and in the corporate press alike, treats it as a strategic-education story: the CIA misjudged Khamenei’s standing, Israel oversold the intelligence, the funeral crowds are proof Washington got Iran wrong. That framing keeps the camera on the decision-makers. It turns 1,701 dead civilians into the cost of someone else’s learning curve.

Reverse the camera. A foreign power killed a head of state in his own capital, expected the population to receive that as liberation, and is now watching millions walk toward Mashhad instead. A second foreign power tried to kill the people sent to end the war it started. The bodies in Tehran’s hospitals and the negotiators forced into an eight-hour drive through the night are the story. Washington’s reassessment of Netanyahu is the footnote.

What the crowds do and do not prove

None of this should be laundered into a claim that Iranians are unanimous in loving their government. State funerals in a system like Iran’s draw managed, organised crowds, and that reality sits alongside the real anger many Iranians have expressed over the economy, sanctions and repression, including the protests of recent years. Nor does handing supreme leadership from father to son, however incapacitated Mojtaba remains, sit easily with the Islamic Republic’s own claim to be something other than a monarchy. Both things are true at once: a population turning out in numbers no state alone can manufacture against a foreign strike that killed their leader, and a domestic politics with real grievances the funeral crowds do not erase.

What is not contestable is this: an assassination and a war aimed at breaking Tehran has produced a ceasefire, a reopened strait, sanctions waivers, and a documented attempt by Israel to kill the very officials negotiating that ceasefire. Washington did not get the outcome it was sold. Iran is burying its dead.