Iran's foreign minister has said “no one knows” who will be the country’s new supreme leader, just hours after a senior official claimed one had been chosen.
Ahmad Alamolhoda, a member of the Assembly of Experts, which will select the leader, had told state media on Sunday morning that a successor had been chosen after an election – without naming who had been selected.
It would be a potentially significant development as the war between Iran and the US and Israel entered its ninth day. Iran’s previous leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in an Israeli strike last Saturday.
However, the country’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi later said “nobody knows” who will succeed Ali Khamenei.
Speaking on NBC’s Meet The Press on Sunday, Mr Araghchi said: “There are lots of rumours around, but we have to wait for the Assembly of Experts to convene and vote for the new supreme leader.”
According to The Guardian, the assembly disagree on how to announce the new leader, with some members believing it can be announced and others believing another session is required before it is made public.
In a post on X in Farsi, the Israeli military also said it would pursue every person who seeks to appoint a successor to Khamenei, referring to the clerical body charged with choosing the next leader, which may be why no announcement has been made.
Donald Trump said that a new leader “is not going to last long” if he does not approve of the choice.
“He’s going to have to get approval from us. If he doesn’t get approval from us, he’s not going to last long. We want to make sure that we don’t have to go back every 10 years, when you don’t have a president like me that’s not going to do it,” the US president told ABC News.
Israel on Sunday struck southern Lebanon, Beirut and oil storage facilities in Tehran as the war in the Middle East keeps escalating, and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there would “many surprises” for the next phase of the conflict.
Iran also hit a desalination plant in Bahrain. Earlier on Sunday, Iran's Mr Araghchi said a US airstrike damaged an Iranian desalination plant on Qeshm Island, warning that in doing so “the US set this precedent, not Iran”.
An Israeli attack on oil storage sites in Tehran sent up pillars of fire that could be seen in an Associated Press video as a glow against the Saturday night sky. It appeared to be the first time a civil industrial facility has been targeted in the war.
The conflict, which erupted on 28 February after joint US-Israeli strikes hit Iran, has so far killed at least 1,230 people in the Islamic Republic, more than 300 in Lebanon and more than a dozen in Israel, according to officials.
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