Middle East crisis live: Mojtaba Khamenei chosen as Iran’s new supreme leader

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Hezbollah claims it has downed an Israeli helicopter in Lebanon, a news report says.

The AFP agency quoted an official from the Iran-backed militant group as saying on Monday that it had downed the copter in eastern Lebanon amid the renewed fighting between Hezbollah and Israel.

“An Israeli helicopter was downed in the mountains east of Baalbek,” the official was quoted as saying, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, notes on social media that while Mojtaba Khamenei has been named Iran’s new supreme leader, succeeding his late father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the father of the 1979 revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, denounced hereditary succession before he died in 1989.

Khomeini wrote:

Islam proclaims monarchy and hereditary succession wrong and invalid. When Islam first appeared in Iran, the Byzantine Empire, Egypt, and the Yemen, the entire institution of monarchy was abolished.

Monarchy and hereditary succession represent the same sinister, evil system of government that prompted the Lord of the Martyrs10 (peace be upon him) to rise up in revolt and seek martyrdom in an effort to prevent its establishment. He revolted in repudiation of the hereditary succession of Yazid, 11 to refuse it his recognition. Islam, then, does not recognize monarchy and hereditary succession; they have no place in Islam.

Summary of the day so far

Iran has named Mojtaba Khamenei as the country’s new supreme leader following the killing of his father Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in US-Israeli strikes, the state-run media announced. He was selected by Iran’s Assembly of Experts, an 88-member body of elected senior clerics tasked with choosing the supreme leader.

Donald Trump warned that Iran’s new leader “is not going to last long” if the Iranians do not get his approval first for the theocratic posting. “He’s going to have to get approval from us,” the president told ABC News. “If he doesn’t get approval from us he’s not going to last long. We want to make sure that we don’t have to go back every 10 years, when you don’t have a president like me that’s not going to do it.”

Another US military service member has died from wounds sustained during Iran’s initial counter-attack a week ago, bringing the number of US troops killed in action so far in the war with Iran to seven, the US military said on Sunday.

Lebanon’s health ministry said the amount of people killed from Israeli airstrikes in the past week had increased to 394, including many women and children.

The Iranian army said on ​Sunday that at ‌least 104 people were killed and 32 ​were wounded ​in an attack by ⁠the US on ​an Iranian warship ​off Sri Lanka’s coast last week.

The IDF began “extensive strikes” against the “infrastructure” of the Iranian regime in Tehran and across other areas in Iran. Despite Israel saying it is striking military or “terror” targets in its war on Iran, many civilians have been killed in its attacks.

Overnight strikes by the US and Israel hit five oil sites around Tehran, according to an Iran official. The official said that the five facilities “were damaged” but the “fire was brought under control”.

Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said the US-Israeli aerial bombardment of Iranian energy infrastructure sites marked a “dangerous new phase” of the conflict and amounted to a war crime.

The Iran war has driven the price of crude oil above $100 per barrel for the first time since 2022.

Trump says oil price spike 'a small price to pay'

President Donald Trump brushed aside concerns about the surging price of oil caused by the US-Israeli airstrikes on Iran, even as the price of crude topped $100 per barrel for the first time since 2022.

“Short term oil prices, which will drop rapidly when the destruction of the Iran nuclear threat is over, is a very small price to pay for U.S.A., and World, Safety and Peace,” Trump wrote, adding in all caps that “only fools would think differently.”

Below, see the announcement of Mojtaba Khamanei as the new leader of Iran that played today on state television. The video was posted by Iranian-British BBC reporter Shayan Sardarizadeh, whose Verify unit specializes in fact-checking and video verification.

Iran war drives oil price above $100 a barrel for first time since 2022

Jillian Ambrose

Global oil prices have breached the $100 (£74) a barrel mark for the first time since 2022 as escalating military aggression in the Middle East continues to wipe 20m barrels of oil from the market each day.

Brent crude, the international benchmark, climbed 12.2% to $104.05 a barrel as the new week’s trading began in the Asia Pacific markets, the first time that market prices have soared above this key psychological threshold since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Prices rose after a weekend of escalating conflict in the Middle East, during which Kuwait’s national oil company announced a “precautionary” cut to its crude oil production.

The oil price returned to triple digits after the highest weekly gains since the Covid-19 pandemic six years ago, and included a $10 increase in the price of US crude on Friday alone.

Iran has largely halted oil and gas exports through strait of Hormuz

“The grace period given by the market to the Trump administration expired at the end of last week,” according to Clayton Seigle, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Studies.

A US Guard soldier tied in Kuwait on March 6, according to a statement from US Central Command. The soldier, whose name was not disclosed, died in a “health-related incident” that occurred “during a medical emergency.”

“The exact cause of death is under review,” the statement says.

As our colleague Lorenzo Tondo reports, Donald Trump told ABC News on Sunday that Iran’s next supreme leader is “not going to last long” if Tehran didn’t “get approval from us”.

The US president said in an interview with Axios laste week, “Khamenei’s son is a lightweight”, calling Mojtaba Khamenei, “unacceptable to me”.

Earlier on Sunday, the Israeli military said in a post on X in Farsi that it would continue pursuing every successor of Ali Khamenei and that it would pursue every person who sought to appoint a successor for him.

Analysts have suggested Mojtaba Khamenei’s appointment is a symbolic move designed to make the regime still appear strong and determined not to bow to western pressure.

The 56-year-old cleric has never held elected office nor formally occupied a senior position within Iran’s government. He has spent much of his life at the centre of power in Iran while remaining largely out of public view.

For many analysts, Mojtaba Khamenei’s appointment is a symbolic move designed to make the regime still appear strong and determined not to bow to western pressure.

The 56-year-old cleric has never held elected office nor formally occupied a senior position within Iran’s government. He has spent much of his life at the centre of power in Iran while remaining largely out of public view.

Born in 1969 in the north-eastern city of Mashhad, Khamenei was raised within the political and clerical world that emerged after the 1979 revolution. As a young man he studied theology in the seminaries of Qom and reportedly took part in the final stages of the Iran-Iraq war.

Unlike many figures in Iran’s leadership, Khamenei never pursued elected office or a prominent government role. Instead, he gradually became an influential presence inside his father’s office, where he was widely seen as part of a small circle managing political access to the supreme leader.

Over the years he cultivated close relationships with conservative clerics and elements of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), a connection analysts say strengthened his standing within the system.

Read more:

Iran names new supreme leader

Iran has named Mojtaba Khamenei as the country’s new supreme leader following the killing of his father Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in US-Israeli strikes, the state-run media announced early Monday.

He was selected by Iran’s Assembly of Experts, an 88-member body of elected senior clerics tasked with choosing the supreme leader.

Mojtaba, a mid-ranking cleric with close ties to the powerful Revolutionary Guards, had long been viewed by elements of Iran’s ruling establishment as a potential successor to his father, who was killed after the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran on 28 February.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and his counterpart from the United Arab Emirates called on Sunday for an end to all attacks on both Iran and Gulf states and said renewed diplomacy was needed to ensure long-term regional security, Reuters reported.

“Attention focused on the necessity of stopping attacks that lead to casualties among the civilian population and cause damage to civilian infrastructure both in the Arab countries of the ... Gulf and in Iran,” the ministry said of Lavrov’s telephone conversation with Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed.

The UAE has maintained good relations with both Russia and Ukraine during their four-year-old war and acted as an intermediary in holding talks and arranging exchanges of prisoners of war.