Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was reportedly killed in Israeli airstrikes at the outset of the military operation inside Iran.
According to New York Post, a report by the Israeli media outlet Ma’ariv stated that Ahmadinejad was under house arrest at the time and was killed in a targeted strike on his residence.
Iranian authorities have not yet confirmed killing of the former president who became the face of Tehran’s nuclear defiance and incendiary anti-Israel rhetoric.
Ahmadinejad served as Iran’s sixth president from 2005 to 2013, rising from relative obscurity as mayor of Tehran to defeat establishment figure Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in a surprise 2005 runoff.
His disputed 2009 reelection triggered the mass “Green Movement” protests, which were violently suppressed by security forces in one of the most serious internal crises of the Islamic Republic.
Critics at home and abroad described him as a confrontational ideologue whose economic management fueled inflation and whose rhetoric deepened Iran’s international isolation.
During his tenure, the United Nations Security Council imposed multiple rounds of sanctions over Iran’s nuclear program, intensifying Tehran’s economic isolation.
Ahmadinejad became especially notorious in the West for his rhetoric toward Israel and his comments about the Holocaust.
In 2006, his government hosted a conference in Tehran widely condemned as a platform for Holocaust denial, drawing international outrage.
During a 2005 conference titled “A World Without Zionism,” he quoted Iran’s founding leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, who had referred to Israel as “the occupying regime of Jerusalem” and a “disgraceful cancerous growth” that “must be wiped off the map.”
In his later years, he clashed openly with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and was repeatedly barred from running for president again, signaling his marginalization within the ruling establishment.
