Israel Pressures Trump to Murder Mojtaba Khamenei and Negotiator Ghalibaf

The murder of Iran’s Supreme Leader represents a new stage in the erosion of the international norm against assassination.

Aída Chávez and the Capital and Empire posted to Substack on May 28 that “Israel is privately lobbying the Department of War to assassinate Iran’s lead negotiator, parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and restart the war with a new round of strikes targeting the country’s oil infrastructure, according to a classified report circulating within the U.S. intelligence community this week.” The report claims

Israeli officials have been clear that they want to restart the US-Israeli bombing campaign and have threatened to kill Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, who replaced his father, Ali Khamenei, after he was killed by an Israeli strike on February 28, the first day of the war.

The story is unsourced, and yet, considering the past behavior of the Zionist state, it is entirely plausible. The list of people assassinated by Israel is extensive.

The massive strike that killed Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif in Gaza also killed 90 people, once again demonstrating Israel will murder innocents its sacred texts (the Talmud and Torah) describe as expendable animals.

Israel violated Syria’s national sovereignty, bombed Iran’s consulate in Damascus, and murdered Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi and six other officers.

Seyed Razi Mousavi, a longtime adviser of the Iranian paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in Syria, was assassinated in a drone attack outside of Damascus.

When Israel murders members of Hamas and others, they often also kill family members, both women and children, as it did when it assassinated Bahaa Abu el-Atta, a senior Islamic Jihad commander.

In Dubai, Israel targeted Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a top Hamas operative. The hit was carried out by Mossad agents disguised as tourists.

Hezbollah commander Fouad Shukr was murdered in a strike in Beirut hours before the assassination of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Iran. The strike on Shukr killed three civilians, including two children.

In 2025, Zionist assassins murdered senior Iranian military and security figures, including Mohammad Bagheri, Hossein Salami, Amir Ali Hajizadeh, Gholamali Rashid, Mohammad Kazemi, and Ali Shadman. Israel killed nuclear scientist and former Atomic Energy Organization chief Fereidoun Abbasi around the same time.

In a brazen violation of international law, the Zionists have murdered diplomats. Ali Larijani, a top Iranian security official, was engaged in negotiations to end the Iran war (or, more accurately, the war initiated against Iran by US-Israel). Larijani was murdered along with his son.

In early 2020, the top Iranian general, Qassem Soleimani, was assassinated while on a peace mission trip to Baghdad. Trump invoked self-defense and imminence, before claiming Soleimani had “American blood on his hands.”

For Israel, there are no red lines, and all religious, political, and military figures are fair game. Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, was assassinated with precision-guided airstrikes that struck his residence.

In June, 2025 Israel’s “Operation Rising Lion” killed at least 14 nuclear scientists in coordinated strikes. Notable scientists and academics, including Fereidoun Abbasi-Davani, Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, and others were assassinated by the Israelis. Between 2007 and 2012, the Zionist executioners took out no less than 25 Iranian nuclear scientists.

According to the Hague Regulations, “killing or wounding treacherously individuals belonging to the hostile nation or army” constitutes a war crime. Additional Protocol I defines perfidy as “acts inviting the confidence of an adversary to lead him to believe that he is entitled to, or obliged to accord, protection under the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, with intent to betray that confidence,” as in the case of Iranian officials engaged in negotiations with a mendacious and treacherous United States.

The murder of Iran’s Supreme Leader “represents a new stage in the erosion of the international norm against assassination,” write Sophie Duroy and Luca Trenta. Ward Thomas, in his piece The New Age of Assassination, argues “the directly targeted killing of foreign adversaries, once rejected as beyond the pale, has become a prominent issue in debates over U.S. security policy.”

Following the attacks of 9/11, the United States, its foreign policy increasingly under the sway of Israel First neocons in the Bush administration, adopted the Zionist method of assassinating adversaries:

This apparent normalisation of assassination as a tool of statecraft rests on two interrelated mechanisms: routinisation and legitimation. Prior to the attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States was a vocal critic of Israel’s practice of assassinating Palestinian activists. After 9/11, however, it quickly adopted the practice and slowly began to legitimate it. With the US adoption of the practice, now strategically renamed “targeted killings”, assassination became increasingly routinised as a tool of statecraft.

Thus Aída Chávez’s claim Israel is “privately lobbying the Department of War to assassinate Iran’s lead negotiator, parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghaliba” should be considered a distinct possibility despite a lack of verifiable evidence of a “classified report circulating within the U.S. intelligence community.”

Benjamin Netanyahu and his fanatical messianic ministers are keen to get the destruction of Iran on schedule again.

Israeli officials are aggressively trying to pull the U.S. away from negotiations and back into war, arguing to senior Trump administration officials that another round of strikes against Iran’s oil infrastructure will generate enough economic devastation and unrest to trigger regime change in Tehran.

In fact, if the war resumes, the “economic devastation” will not be confined to Iran. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has resulted in global energy market fluctuations, with oil prices spiking above $100 per barrel. The closure will create cascading disruptions far beyond energy, including long-term supply chain effects, an increase in freight rates (currently 154% above normal), a serious reduction in global seaborne naphtha, a corrosive increase in inflation and ultimately stagflation, and a catastrophic reduction in the shipment of ammonia-based nitrogen fertilizer (the strait’s closure since late February 2026 has blocked approximately one-third of global fertilizer trade, threatening to push 45 million additional people into acute hunger worldwide).

Netanyahu is not worried in the least about destroying the world economy. He is laser-focused on establishing Greater Israel in West Asia. The Zionists believe their assassination program, genocide, land grabs, and ethnic cleansing will result in control of a large share of the world’s oil and energy supplies, and capture the main trade routes in the region. However, without the support of the United States, this will remain an impossible dream, no matter how many Iranian diplomats, scientists, and school girls are murdered.