By Tal Shalev, Jeremy Diamond, Abbas Al Lawati

(CNN) — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader who ruled the country for almost four decades, has been killed, according to US President Donald Trump and two Israeli sources.

Israel has not shared evidence of Khamenei’s death, and a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry earlier insisted that Khamenei, 86, and Iran’s president were both “safe and sound.”

But Khamenei has not been seen in public or in videos since Israel and the United States attacked Iran on Saturday morning, unleashing barrages of airstrikes.

Trump announced the death on his Truth Social platform, calling Khamenei “one of the most evil people in History.” Israeli sources concluded earlier on Saturday that Khamenei and other senior Iranian officials were dead.

The news appeared likely to plunge the Islamic Republic into the most serious crisis since its establishment.

Cheers and celebrations were heard in parts of Tehran Saturday night following reports of Khamenei’s death.

Here’s what we know:

What happened?

Soon after the United States and Israel began joint strikes on Iran on Saturday, Israeli sources told CNN that airstrikes targeted Iran’s top leadership, including Khamenei.

Satellite images from Airbus showed black smoke rising from the supreme leader’s compound in the capital, Tehran. The images appear to show that several buildings in the compound were severely damaged by strikes.

Trump described Khamenei’s reported death as “the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country.”

In announcing the joint US-Israeli attack, Trump said one of its aims was regime change, and he called on the Iranian people to rise up against the government once operations finished. However, it was unclear whether such change would result from Khamenei’s death, which appeared likely to usher in hard-line rule by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, experts said.

What led up to this?

The reports of Khamenei’s death come at a time when Iran is arguably at its weakest since he took power in the 1989. Decades of Western sanctions had already left the country isolated and economically battered before US and Israeli strikes in June 2025 dealt his rule a severe blow.

Just six months later, protests that began over economic grievances quickly turned political, spreading across all 31 of the country’s provinces within weeks. The regime responded with a brutal crackdown, killing thousands of protesters and prompting a global outcry, including a threat of intervention from the Trump administration.

That intervention came on Saturday, when Trump said the US military was undertaking a “massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests.”

He also called on the Iranian people to “take over your government,” adding that they now “have a president who is giving you what you want, so let’s see how you respond.”

Who could replace Khamenei?

According to Iran’s constitution, an Assembly of Experts would be tasked with appointing a new supreme leader. Until that appointment, an interim three-member council — consisting of the president, the head of the judiciary and a jurist of the country’s Guardian Council — is tasked with carrying out the duties of the leader, according to the Middle East Institute.

Who could lead Iran next remains a mystery, even to those who have removed him. In January, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that “no one knows” who would take over if Khamenei was removed.

“I don’t think anyone can give you a simple answer to what happens next in Iran if the supreme leader and the regime were to fall,” he said.

How are Iranians reacting?

During widespread protests in January, Khamenei was the focus of many demonstrators’ anger. Videos from some protests showed crowds chanting “Death to Khamenei” in direct defiance of his authority, while others called for his removal. The regime employed unprecedented levels of violence, with officials framing the demonstrations as a continuation of an Israeli-American conspiracy against the Islamic Republic.

The protests were the biggest since the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in the custody of the religious police in 2022. Those protests were also suppressed with deadly force.

In one video obtained by CNN from an eyewitness in Tehran on Saturday as reports of Khamenei’s death circulated, the voices of two women can be heard chanting, “Death to the Islamic Republic” and “Long Live the shah,” in Farsi, before cheers and whistles erupt.

In a similar video, cheers are heard echoing across a residential neighborhood in the city.

How would this impact the wider Middle East?

Khamenei’s death would have the potential to trigger the greatest shift in regional dynamics since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, after which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a sweeping campaign to eliminate actors hostile to his country across the Middle East — including Iran and its regional proxies.

It would be the second time in less than a century that the United States has acted to remove an Iranian leader from power. In 1953, Mohammad Mossadegh, a secular, democratically elected prime minister, was overthrown in an Iranian army coup backed by the CIA and British intelligence after he nationalized the country’s oil industry. That event restored Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to the throne and, after the monarch was deposed in the 1979 Islamic revolution, played a central role in the Islamic Republic’s anti-US narrative. It regularly cited by Khamenei as a symbol of US imperialism and the reason for his distrust of the West.

Iran is home to a diverse population of more than 90 million, including Persians, Azeris, Arabs, Baloch and Kurds. Under Khamenei’s decades-long rule, the Islamic Republic largely managed to contain civil and ethnic unrest.

But with no clear successor, his death would raise serious concerns about the stability of Iran, as well as the wider region, with potential consequences for the global economy.

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