Israel vs Palestine/Lebanon/Iran/Yemen/Syria: a New Middle East War

[Szymon]

Posted by Ravenlocke (here)
Al Mayadeen English


Aged 86, Islamic Republic Leader Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei was martyred at the hands of the Israeli occupation forces following large-scale aggression that targeted Iran on Saturday morning.

The legendary scholar led Iran from late 1989, following the death of his mentor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolutionary who founded the Islamic Republic of Iran.

https://x.com/MayadeenEnglish/status...21909648683070

Interesting, I noticed that Krzysztof mentioned a mourning at the start of 2026. Maybe this is connected to this event?

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/sho...=1#post1701071

Also, the probability of the war in March (75%) by a day is also interesting. It also looks like the financial/economic stress is predicted at 80% for March too. Maybe the closing of the strait and deliveries of oil are going to have a fall-on effect on the worldwide economies, especially related to the petrodollar.

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/sho...=1#post1702190

Cheers,

[Ravenlocke]

dana

4m
🇮🇷⚔️🇺🇸🇮🇱‼️ IRGC Public Relations:

“The most intense offensive operation in the history of the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran will begin in moments towards the occupied territories and the bases of American terrorists”

https://x.com/dana916/status/2027931561367113909

THE ISLANDER

4m
🇮🇷 KHAMENEI IS DEAD. THE MISSILES KEPT FLYING.

Washington spent two decades building a theory: kill the Supreme Leader, Iran collapses, the population rises, the regime falls. Today they got their decapitation. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — thirty-five years as Supreme Leader, survivor of Saddam’s chemical weapons, Stuxnet, Mossad assassinations, two American air campaigns — is confirmed dead by Iranian state media. The thing the neocons dreamed about since 1991 finally happened.

Now watch what followed. The Assembly of Experts convened within the hour. The IRGC announced “the martyrdom of the Supreme Leader obliges maximum force.” The Basij mobilised. The missiles kept flying. Every succession mechanism activated without a single visible fracture — not because Iranians love the Islamic Republic, but because Iran’s constitution was written by people who survived the Shah and engineered specifically for this moment. Washington didn’t trigger a revolution. It created a martyr. The entire country — reformists, hardliners, seculars, the people who despise the clerics — unified around a flag draped on a coffin. The most reliable political unifier in human history is a foreign bomb. They knew this. They did it anyway.

The seismic implication isn’t what happens in Tehran. It’s what every government from Caracas to Jakarta to Pretoria just watched: a state absorbed the assassination of its supreme leader, kept its command structure intact, kept its missiles flying, and kept its succession orderly — while the man who ordered the strike asked for a ceasefire before the day was out and the man who engineered it was in Berlin, having fled like a do coward. The dying empire’s theory of dominance just failed its ultimate test. In public. In real time. In front of the entire Global South. That demonstration is worth more to the multipolar project than a decade of diplomatic communiques. They broke the spell.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Now comes the consequences. Cold and brutal.


https://x.com/IslanderWORLD/status/2027932262205907075

[Ravenlocke]

Sputnik Mundo

Translated from Spanish
🇮🇷💥🪖 Iran Announces the Launch of Tehran’s “Most Brutal Offensive Operation” Against the US and Israel

The offensive by Tel Aviv and Washington against the Persian country will be met with force, stated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

“The most brutal offensive operation in the history of the Iranian Armed Forces will begin in a matter of moments, targeting the occupied territories and U.S. terrorist bases,” the statement read.

🗣 This was announced moments after local state television confirmed the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who died in his office during the U.S. and Israel attacks that took place on February 28.

👉 Likewise, Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, emphasized that the death of the supreme leader “will not go unanswered.”

https://x.com/SputnikMundo/status/2027937364165742950

Sputnik Mundo

Translated from Spanish
❗️🇮🇷 The death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei will not go unanswered, affirms Iran's president

The passing of the Ayatollah during the military offensive by Israel and the United States against Iranian soil will have reprisals, assured Masoud Pezeshkian, president of the Persian country.

🗣 "This crime will not go unanswered. We will force those who organized and carried out this [act] to regret it," reads the official statement disseminated by the local Presidential Office on Telegram.

🗣 For its part, Iranian state television broadcast a message from the Supreme National Security Council confirming Khamenei's death. It also warned that the martyrdom of its Supreme Leader will be the beginning of an "escalation in the fight against the oppressors."

https://x.com/SputnikMundo/status/2027932439947915492

[Szymon]

News just in.

[shaberon]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
(And an aside: if the Ayatollah really has been killed, then he was the only person in Iran who had issued a fatwa that Iran should NOT develop a nuclear weapon. His successor might not necessarily share that view.)

Yes, all the restraint was on the part of diplomats.

All of the military would have started and ended this already.

Nothing to add, right now, just an announcement of another wave about an hour ago. I am usually up late so, there may be something in the wee hours.

Off the bat, eliminating the Big Eye in Qatar was accompanied by another radar in Bahrain. MST may have had some sigint role as well, it is MS-class Tomahawk. These reprisals would appear to cause partial loss of function.

Flight Data shows the Zion airplane landing in Berlin, however its passengers are pure speculation right now.


On behalf of the Iraqi Resistance:

An Iraqi Hezbollah military base in Babil had been targeted in the attacks.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by ThePythonicCow (here)
Here is a quite different take on this new eruption of the Middle East War, than many of the above posts.

According to my son, he's seeing quite a few live reports from Iranians, both currently living inside Iran, and ex-patriots living elsewhere now, but still with friends and family living inside Iran.

These reports are welcoming the bombing, and view it as taking down an autocratic oppressive theocracy that they despise.

Here's one such report, that Patrick Byrne reposted from X.com, to his Telegram channel t.me/PatrickMByrne:

From:

Houman David Hemmati, MD, PhD
@houmanhemmati
https://x.com/houmanhemmati/status/2027634094453231658

Begin text copied from X:

47 years ago, I stood at a window in Tehran as a 3-year-old boy, smelling burning tires and hearing the chants that would steal my country. I didn’t have words for what was happening. Today, I am watching smoke rise over the same city — but this time the smoke is not the end of Iran. It is, God willing, the beginning of her resurrection.

Several weeks ago I wrote in that the fever of 1979 was finally breaking. I never imagined I would wake up to see that fever confronted so directly. Israel — with the clear support of the United States — has launched a preemptive strike deep into Tehran and against the regime’s military machinery. Explosions in the capital. Military targets hit. The IRGC’s aura of invincibility, already cracked, is shattering in real time.

I do not celebrate war. No decent person does. What I celebrate — what millions of Iranians inside the country and in the diaspora have prayed for in secret for decades — is the possibility that a regime which has no right to exist may finally be forced to go.

This is the same regime that:
- Armed and cheered the October 7 massacre against Israel for no reason other than pure genocidal hatred.
- Murdered tens of thousands of its own sons and daughters who dared to walk peacefully in the streets demanding the most basic freedoms.
- Gouges out the eyes of young women for the “crime” of wearing makeup.
- Hangs teenagers from cranes for posting a tweet.
- Exports terror, poverty, and darkness to every corner it can reach including the U.S.

No nation, no people, should have to live under that. Not Israelis. Not Americans. Not Lebanese. Not Syrians. And certainly not Iranians.

I am a physician who has spent his life trying to heal bodies and a son of Iran who has spent his life mourning a stolen homeland. What we are witnessing is not aggression — it is surgery. Painful, necessary surgery to remove a tumor that has metastasized for 47 years. The tumor is the Islamic Republic that has hijacked Iran.

To the brave pilots and special operators of the Israeli Air Force and the men and women of the United States military now carrying out this mission: I pray for you with everything I have.

May God shield you from harm. May every missile find its target and every soldier return home safely to the families who love them. You are not invaders. You are the answer to the prayers of millions who have whispered “enough” in the dark since 1979. You are giving our friends the chance to breathe free air again. The entire region will owe you a peace we have not known in my lifetime.

To my fellow Iranians watching from inside the country right now, heart pounding, maybe hiding in basements or on rooftops: Hold on. The end is clearer than it has ever been. The regime’s fear is real. Their eyes — those same eyes that once stared down at us with absolute power — now show something they haven’t shown in decades: panic. The math has changed. The window of 1979 is finally closing.

To the little three-year-old boy I once was — and to every little boy and girl in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, and Tabriz today who hears explosions instead of lullabies: This time the sounds are not the closing of a door. They are the opening of one.

The road ahead will not be easy. Transitions never are. But the direction is unmistakable. A secular, prosperous, free Iran is no longer a dream — it is becoming an inevitability.

I have lived the stolen life so that others might not have to. Today, for the first time in 47 years, I allow myself to believe that the stealing is almost over.

Thank you, Israel. Thank you, America. The Iranian people — the real Iran — will never forget.

The fever is breaking.
The dawn of 2026 is here.
And this time, the light wins.

End text copied from X

I would suggest that we do not confuse

• the "Bomb, bomb, bomb; bomb bomb bomb Iran" violence of oppressive Zionists such as the former Senator John McCain, who would have bombed the Iranian people and nation back to the stone age,
• with the focused take down of a globalist/imperialist installed and sponsored oppressive, terrorist sponsoring, theocracy, thereby freeing the people of Iran.

[Ravenlocke]

The whole story,

Houman David Hemmati, MD, PhD
@houmanhemmati
🇮🇷 As a Jewish Persian who fled the 1979 revolution as a little boy, I never thought I would live to see this.

But here we are.

This Monday night and Tuesday — March 2 and 3 — Purim falls.

And I am officially proposing something bold, joyful, and long overdue:

Purim is no longer just a Jewish holiday.
It is now Iran’s holiday. And the world’s.

A global celebration of the defeat of evil — whenever and wherever it rises.

Let me tell you the story in plain words, because every Persian, every Christian, every secular Muslim, every person who loves freedom needs to hear it right now.

In ancient Persia (the very land we call Iran today), an evil man named Haman — the second-most powerful figure in the empire — hatched a plan to kill every single Jew in the kingdom. One day, one decree, total annihilation.

But a secretly Jewish queen named Esther stepped forward. She risked her life, revealed her identity to the king, and exposed Haman’s genocidal plot. Haman was hanged on the very gallows he had built for the Jews. His 75,000 henchmen who had armed themselves to carry out the massacre were defeated instead. The Jewish people were saved.

That is Purim.

It’s why we call it the Jewish Halloween — costumes, noise, heavy drinking, pure joy.
We read the whole story aloud from the Megillah. Every time Haman’s name is mentioned, we boo, stomp, shake noisemakers, and drown it out with cheers.
We eat triangular cookies called Hamantashen — shaped like Haman’s ears (or his hat, depending who you ask) — so we literally bite off a piece of the villain every year.

And this year?
This year is the living, breathing repeat of Purim — but for all the Persian people and the entire world.

Ali Khamenei — the modern Haman who hijacked our beautiful Iran, who armed October 7, who murdered tens of thousands of his own citizens, who gouged eyes and hung teenagers — is dead.
His top enablers and IRGC commanders are gone with him.

The gallows they built for the Iranian people have been turned against them.

The evil regime that stole our country in 1979 has just suffered its own Purim miracle.

So here is my invitation to every single one of you — Christian, secular Muslim, atheist, Persian, Israeli, American, anyone who cheered when the tumor was finally removed:

This Monday night and Tuesday, go celebrate Purim like it’s your holiday — because it now is.

Find a synagogue near you. No excuse - at the very least there’s a
@Chabad
in every corner of the planet— they are the most welcoming, joyful, open-hearted communities on earth. They will embrace you with open arms, delicious food, and zero judgment.

Register in advance for security (these are crazy but beautiful times).

Bring your kids in costumes. Dress up as Queen Esther, as Persian kings and queens, fighter pilots, even
@realDonaldTrump
— whatever makes you smile.

Be ready to eat, drink (a lot — it’s a mitzvah!), laugh, and make maximum noise every single time Haman’s name is read.

Let the booing be for Khamenei too.
Let the cheers be for a free Iran, a peaceful Middle East, and a world finally rid of that 47-year nightmare.

Purim has always been about the underdog defeating the tyrant in the very heart of Persia.

Today the story has come full circle.

The evil has been hanged.
The people are rising.
The light is winning.

So let’s make this the first global Purim — a holiday for every Iranian who wants their country back, and every human being who believes evil must fall.

Come celebrate with us.

The regime’s Haman is dead.

Now let the real Persia — free, proud, and joyful — live again.

Who’s with me?

Monday and Tuesday.

Synagogues. Costumes. Hamantashen. Cheers.

For Iran. For Israel. For freedom. For all of us.

🇮🇷❤️🇮🇱🎉

Bring everyone you know.

The world has waited 2,500 years for this encore.

Let’s make it the loudest, happiest Purim in history

https://x.com/houmanhemmati/status/2027963375502954874

[Ravenlocke]

🅰pocalypsis 🅰pocalypseos 🇷🇺 🇨🇳 🅉 reposted

Arya - آریا

City of Yazd right now.

Massive presence of Iranians mourning for martyr Imam Khamenei. They all demand vengeance.

https://x.com/AryJeay/status/2027977883054973027

🅰pocalypsis 🅰pocalypseos 🇷🇺 🇨🇳 🅉 reposted

Ali Abunimah

Netanyahu and Trump succeeded in their goal of getting the Iranian masses into the streets …

https://x.com/AliAbunimah/status/2027985068850081969

[Ravenlocke]

🅰pocalypsis 🅰pocalypseos 🇷🇺 🇨🇳 🅉 reposted

Ahmed Hassan 🇾🇪 أحمد حسن زيد
@Ahmed_hassan_za
·
2h
Iraqi youth attack the US embassy in Baghdad

https://x.com/Ahmed_hassan_za/status...62869300506953

[Ravenlocke]

DD Geopolitics

36m
🇮🇷🇮🇶 The US Base at Harir Airport in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan was subjected to another Iranian attack.

https://x.com/DD_Geopolitics/status/2027997940032409934

[Ravenlocke]

DD Geopolitics

53m
🇮🇷 "We were at the negotiating table. They are the aggressors who do not honor any commitment."

Larijani, Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, says Iran was ready to negotiate but the US attacked anyway. Iran's armed forces are prepared for sustained operations:

"America cannot force the Iranian nation to submit. They will leave disgraced."

https://x.com/DD_Geopolitics/status/2027993916109123626

[Ravenlocke]

DD Geopolitics

52m
🇶🇦🇮🇷 The current situation in Doha, Qatar as a result of Iranian strikes

https://x.com/DD_Geopolitics/status/2027995022931771426

[Ravenlocke]

DD Geopolitics

35m
🚨🇵🇰🇺🇸 BREAKING: Reports that protesters in Karachi, Pakistan have breached the U.S. Consulate.

Pakistan has the second-largest Shia population in the world after Iran. Karachi alone has millions.

The last time a U.S. diplomatic compound was overrun in this region of the world, it changed American foreign policy for 444 days.

https://x.com/DD_Geopolitics/status/2027999418591654180

[Ravenlocke]

Daniel McAdams reposted

Bassem Youssef Commentary

There is a big difference between a leader who is martyred among his people and a leader who flees to Germany / Greece and leaves his people in shelters

https://x.com/bassem_youssef9/status...45293262524859

[Ravenlocke]

Pepe Escobar

2h
FROM MARTYRDOM TO REVENGE

Decapitation strike.

Council of Experts convened in minutes.

IRGC: "maximum force" in response.

Unleashed over the death cult + petro-chihuahuas.

Succession mechanism: in place.

Command structure: in place.

No regime change.

Zero imperial strategic dominance.

The Global South is watching.

Now comes revenge.

https://x.com/RealPepeEscobar/status...76347411484942

¤=[Post Update]=¤

Aaron Rupar

2h
Trump: “Iran just stated that they are going to hit very hard today, harder than they have ever been hit before. THEY BETTER NOT DO THAT, HOWEVER, BECAUSE IF THEY DO, WE WILL HIT THEM WITH A FORCE THAT HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE! Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

https://x.com/atrupar/status/2027978136676377051

[Ravenlocke]

Vali Nasr

Well-said 👇🏼

ابتسام الكتبي
@ekitbi
Khamenei’s death if confirmed would not mean the collapse of the regime, as its security and ideological institutions are deeply entrenched. However, it would signal Iran’s entry into a delicate phase of recalibration, in which its trajectory will be shaped by a choice between hardline rigidity to preserve the legacy, or pragmatic adjustment to safeguard stability.

The real question is not only Who will succeed him? but rather;
Will the transition be managed through a closed security mindset, or through a strategic outlook seeking recalibration and repositioning?

https://x.com/vali_nasr/status/2027944448835854747

Vali Nasr

Excellent analysis by
@Alihashem
on why Khamenei’s death does not mean the end for Islamic Republic. He argues it is built to withstand the Ayatollah's Assassination. Decapitation as strategy is unlikely to achieve US and Israel’s war goals.

https://x.com/vali_nasr/status/2027895787837849989

[Ravenlocke]

Al Mayadeen English


1h
Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, said that in accordance with the constitution, a leadership council has been formed to assume the responsibilities of the Supreme Leader until a successor is chosen.

Article 111 of the Iranian Constitution states that if the Leader dies, resigns, or is dismissed, the Assembly of Experts must quickly appoint a successor, and until then, a temporary council made up of the President, the Head of the Judiciary, and a jurist from the Guardian Council will carry out the Leader’s duties, with replacements elected if any member is unable to serve.

Larijani added that the armed forces are carrying out tremendous efforts to confront "a scheme to fragment Iran," stressing that everyone must rally around them.

Larijani also stated that Iranian missiles were launched yesterday toward US bases and the Israeli entity, describing the strikes as painful and warning that today’s response will be even more painful.

#Iran #SayyedAliKhamenei #UnitedStates #News #AlMayadeen

https://x.com/MayadeenEnglish/status...89791128568088

[Ravenlocke]

Drop Site

4m
6 protestors killed in Pakistan as some try to set US consulate on fire

https://x.com/DropSiteNews/status/2028011472270369224

[Ravenlocke]

Drop Site

11m
Iran's state TV has confirmed the killings of two more senior military figures in US-Israeli strikes on Saturday when a Defence Council meeting was hit:

1. Abdolrahim Mousavi: Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces

2. Aziz Nasirzadeh: Defense Minister

Authorities had earlier confirmed that Ali Shamkhani, secretary of the Supreme National Defense Council, and Mohammad Pakpour, head of the IRGC, were also killed.

https://x.com/DropSiteNews/status/2028010128302096857

[Ravenlocke]

Square profile picture
Drop Site

13m
⭕️ Ryan Grim on Democrats’ cynical political calculations

Grim argues that many Democrats quietly support US strikes on Iran and even regime change, but understand a broader war is deeply unpopular. He says that helps explain why party leaders did not advance a War Powers vote before the attack, allowing it to stall until after the strike.

Publicly, Democrats demand explanations and warn Trump is acting “recklessly.” Privately, Grim suggests, they see a political win-win: if the war goes badly or leads to U.S. casualties, Trump pays the price.

@jeremyscahill
|
@ryangrim

https://x.com/DropSiteNews/status/2028010028796371408

https://x.com/DropSiteNews/status/2028007260601917559