Iran’s ex-foreign minister Kharazi ‘gravely wounded’ in attack on his home
Kamal Kharazi has been seriously wounded in an apparent assassination attempt that killed his wife, as United States-Israeli strikes continue to pound Iran for a fifth week.
Iranian media on Thursday reported that Kharazi’s home in Tehran was targeted the previous day in an air strike. The official was hospitalized with serious injuries, according to newspapers Shargh, Etemad, and Ham Mihan.
“We have seen what looks like an assassination attempt against the former foreign minister, Kamal Kharazi … We don’t know why he’s been targeted. He has been gravely wounded, and his wife was killed,” said Al Jazeera.
Air strikes were reported on Thursday across Iran, including in Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz. Four people were reported killed in Larestan, in southern Iran.
Meanwhile, the spokesperson of the armed forces’ unified command said Tehran will press on with the Middle East war until the US and Israel face “permanent regret and surrender," the semiofficial Tasnim news agency reported.
More than 1,340 people have been killed in Iran since the US and Israel launched joint air strikes on February 28.
At least 24 people have been killed in Israel, as well as 13 US soldiers in the region.
Last week, several media reports quoted Kharazi saying that Iran had not shut down all avenues for negotiation and was open to possible indirect talks, even though in an interview with CNN last month, he said he saw “no room for diplomacy” with the US.
“Trump had been deceiving others and not keeping with his promises, and we experienced this in two times of negotiations—that while we were engaged in negotiation, they struck us,” Kharazi told Media.
As reported by Al Jazeera, the exact motives for the attempted assassination are unclear. Kharazi was known to be the head of the Strategic Council on Foreign Relations and a former adviser to the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed by the US and Israel on the first day of the war.
