Iran’s new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei was pulled from a bombed Tehran hospital’s rubble after U.S.-Israel strikes nearly killed him again, a senior cleric claims.
A member of Iran’s Assembly of Experts says Mojtaba Khamenei was wounded in the February fighting, rushed into care in Tehran, and then had to be dug out after hospitals themselves came under attack. The account lands months after the 56-year-old was named the Islamic Republic’s top cleric and has still not been seen or heard in public.
The New York Post reported the claims from Mohsen Heydari, who spoke this week on Qatari network Al Araby and described a succession scramble under fire, a paper ballot in a secret room, and a leader whose health story keeps shifting depending on who is talking.
Heydari’s version is blunt. Mojtaba was hurt and hospitalized. Then the bombs kept coming.
"Even after he had been wounded and taken to the hospital, three hospitals in Tehran were bombed,"
Heydari said. He added:
"Mojtaba Khamenei was in the third hospital and was pulled from the rubble."
After that extraction, Mojtaba vanished to an unknown location. He has not appeared publicly, and his voice has not been heard, since the hospital strikes described in the account.
The war timeline in the reporting starts Feb. 28. U.S. and Israeli forces struck Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Tehran compound to open the campaign. The 86-year-old supreme leader was reported killed along with dozens of top regime figures.
Mojtaba, long described as a man of the shadows and an adviser to his father without a formal state post, was nearly killed in that same period and rushed to a Tehran hospital. In the days that followed, three hospitals in the capital were reportedly bombed. Heydari places Mojtaba in the third one, and says rescuers pulled him from the debris.
The Assembly of Experts, the body charged with choosing a new supreme leader, took hits of its own. Its secretariat in Qom was bombed. Eight people were killed. Reports and recommendations burned. Members later wrote ballots by hand after being summoned to a secret room without advance word on the location or the meeting’s full nature.
Heydari said he was the first to put Mojtaba’s name forward in that session. The vote ran 50 of 59 for Mojtaba, eight for Ayatollah Alireza Arafi, and one abstention. The selection was set March 8. State television announced it. Reporting says Mojtaba apparently learned he had been tapped the same way ordinary Iranians did, on TV, and that once the body decided, he was treated as legally and religiously bound to take the role.
"Given the enemy’s position, we will choose and elect no one as leader and supreme guide of the Islamic Republic except Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei,"
Heydari recalled telling the session. He also said:
"We obtained information that Mojtaba Khamenei was healthy and able to lead, and we determined that he met the requirements of religious qualification, justice and competence to manage the country,"
President Trump had warned Iran against installing the late ayatollah’s son. On Mojtaba’s condition, Trump was direct about the wounds and careful about the outcome.
"He was very seriously wounded. The left side of his body, the arm, the leg, the whole thing. He was very seriously wounded, but I don’t think he’s dead,"
Trump said, and separately:
"I don’t think he’s dead"
That sits in open tension with other official lines from Tehran. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, speaking on Fox News while in New York for the U.N. General Assembly, claimed the supreme leader was “completely” healthy. Pezeshkian said they met for about seven hours last month and “conducted talks.”
U.S. intelligence reporting cited in the same coverage pointed the other way, toward serious disfigurement from the attacks. The public record Mojtaba himself has offered is silence: no confirmed public appearance and no released voice since the rubble account.
Reuters reported that three people close to Mojtaba’s inner circle say Iran’s new supreme leader is still recovering from severe facial and leg injuries suffered in the Feb. 28 airstrike that killed his father. Those sources said he remains mentally sharp, joins senior discussions by audio on the war and talks with Washington, and could show his face in public within one to two months. No photo, video, or audio of him has been released since the March 8 appointment, the same reporting said.
Middle East Institute analyst Alex Vatanka told Reuters the new leader would be only one voice among others and would have to prove himself as the credible, powerful, overriding authority, a reminder that title and control are not the same thing inside a system dominated by the Revolutionary Guards and factional muscle.
Stack the claims side by side and the problem writes itself. Heydari told the Assembly Mojtaba was healthy enough to lead. Pezeshkian told an American audience the leader was fully healthy and that they sat through a seven-hour meeting. Trump described grave wounds to the left side of the body but rejected reports of Mojtaba’s death. Inner-circle sources speaking to Reuters described severe facial disfigurement and leg injuries, audio-only participation, and a possible public reappearance months later. The simplest verified fact across the file is the one Tehran has not erased: Iran’s new supreme leader has stayed out of sight.
Heydari’s hospital account, if accurate, also underlines how far the campaign reached into the regime’s safety net. A compound strike that killed the old supreme leader. A secretariat bombing that forced a paper vote in a hidden room. Hospital targets in Tehran while the heir was in a ward. Then a succession announcement on state TV while the man named to the job remained unseen.
For a national audience, the Assembly of Experts is the clerical body Iran’s system uses to pick and supervise the supreme leader, the ultimate authority over the state, the military direction, and the nuclear file. When that body is bombed, balloting by hand in a secret room, and installing a son who never held a normal elected post, it is not a picture of calm continuity. It is a picture of a theocracy improvising under pressure.
Mojtaba’s pre-war profile fits the same pattern. At 56 he was the adviser in the background, not a minister with a public portfolio. The March 8 elevation made him the face of the system overnight. The weeks and months since have given Iranians and the outside world almost nothing to see of that face, only dueling assurances, intelligence chatter about scars, and a cleric’s televised memory of rubble and rescue.
Absolute dates for each hospital strike, the precise moment of the extraction, and independent on-camera proof of Mojtaba’s current condition remain thin in the available accounts. What is not thin is the contradiction: a regime that demands total obedience at home cannot produce its own supreme leader for a simple public appearance, even while its president insists he is fine and its Assembly alumni describe him being hauled from a wrecked ward.
Regimes that preach invincibility and hide their leaders at the same time are telling on themselves. Strength that never shows its face is strength other nations are right to doubt.
