Three days before his assassination, Haaretz, Israel’s oldest newspaper, wrote an almost 5,000-word profile of Iranian security chief Ali Larijani, titled “Ruthless leader and brilliant philosopher: who is is Ali Larijani, Iran’s most powerful man”.
It was a nuanced look at one of the most highly experienced officials of the Islamic Republic, whose life and career had quite a few contradictions. Mr Larijani condemned a violent crackdown on demonstrations in 2009, which killed 12 people, and yet was central to the crackdown on protests in January this year, which some estimates say killed as many as 30,000 people. He was an expert on western philosophy, at the heart of one of the most anti-western regimes. He railed against the US, and yet his daughter was a medical doctor in that very same country.
Elsewhere in the Israeli media, fascination was also growing. It was as if Israel, still heady from its joint assassination with the US of former supreme leader Ali Khamenei, was preparing for its next target. Israel’s policy of killing senior enemy leaders has expanded rapidly since the Gaza War began and now feels normal, even when it targets Iran’s head of state, which many condemned as a violation of international law.
Israel assassinated Mr Larijani on Tuesday.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu celebrated his killing as a key moment in the fight against Iran, describing him as “the boss of the Revolutionary Guards, that group of gangsters that effectively runs Iran”.
Mr Larijani’s influence in Iran's powerful Islamic Revoutionary Guard Corps, as well as his vast experience across other parts of government, has led some analysts to argue that by killing him, Israel has made it more difficult for the US to end the war.
The breadth of Mr Larijani's career in the Islamic Republic is arguably unprecedented. Over 40 years, he worked as a government minister, propaganda chief, parliamentary speaker and a senior IRGC official. After Mr Khamenei’s killing he was widely viewed to be Iran’s key decision-maker, in a war that appears to be bogging down the US, the world’s most formidable military power. His experience made him the sort of person with the clout to negotiate a ceasefire deal, and bring Iran's factions, now in chaos, together.
Mr Larijani "could have certainly been a candidate for serious negotiations with the US," Iranian columnist and historian Arash Azizi told The National.
"But perhaps the hard line public positions he had taken in recent weeks complicated his position. His killing is also a gift to his potential rivals in Iran’s power structure."
Trita Parsi, an Iran analyst and vice president of the Quincy Institute, described the assassination as “Israel trying to literally kill off Trump’s off-ramps”.
Mr Larijani was “someone who favoured talks with the US and who could build consensus within the system for an Iranian off-ramp at some point,” Mr Parsi wrote, in a post on X.
“The Israelis want the war to continue to degrade Iran's military capabilities further to shift the balance in the region in Israel's favour for years to come. They have fought for more than two decades to get the US to go to full war with Iran, and having finally achieved that goal, they do not want [US President Donald] Trump to cut the war short. Without figures like Larijani in the Iranian system, Trump's pathways to ending the war just got narrower.”
Iran expert Seyed Emamian said that “while Trump seems politically desperate looking for a ‘face-saving exit plan’, Israel’s war policy seems centred around political decapitation in Iran”.
Mr Larijani’s assassination “has been widely understood as wiping out any potential for an off-ramp deal, blocking a US exit plan and ensuring its continuous involvement in the current and originally Israeli war,” Mr Emamian added.
Iran analyst Sima Shine, at Israeli think tank INSS, dismissed Mr Larijani’s potential to provide the US with a route to end the conflict.
“I don’t think he was in any way a pragmatist. All these decisions on high-ranking people, as far as I understand, is decided between the US and Israel.
"If the US would have understood that Larijani was a moderate reformist leader that could make a change in Iran, I assume they would have told Israel,” she said.
“There is a wishfulness to have someone in Iran in the high ranks that can change things and take Iran on a different course. It’s difficult to find someone who is on the one hand a pragmatist or can make a change, and on the other hand is important enough to be able to talk to all branches,” she added.
“The people being eliminated are focal elements in the decision of Iran to go for nuclear military capabilities and to strike Israel and the Gulf, therefore the understanding in Israel is that by eliminating them, perhaps the system will change its course of thinking and go for any kind of an agreement.”
Saud Al Sharafat, a Jordanian security specialist and former intelligence brigadier general, said that concerns about a chaotic “day after” and who would replace Mr Larijani are “unimportant” as far as Israel and the US are concerned.
“They went after the topmost echelons because leadership symbols are very important in the Iranian psyche. These are psychological blows as much as military blows,” said Mr Al Sharafat, who leads the Shorufat ِCentre for Globalisation and Terrorism Studies.
Replacing Mr Larijani and the others eliminated in the leadership is “not a big deal” in Iran’s “secretive mafiosi system”, Mr Al Sharafat said. “They have a hierarchy and everyone has a replacement, even the cook.”
It would be of no concern to the US and Israel if the assassinations contribute to creating chaos in the country, Mr Al Sharafat said.
“Chaos might be the desired goal. The Americans do not care about the day after,” he said, pointing to Iraq and Afghanistan. “The two countries look set to remain mired in instability for decades without forming a significant threat to the US.”
“Leaving behind an open wound is sometimes in their interest,” Mr Al Sharafat said.
“Iran might take decades to wake up” from the US and Israeli hits.
With additional reporting from Mohamad Ali Harisi and Khaled Yacoub Oweis
