ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq – The Israeli army on Tuesday targeted the building of Iran’s Assembly of Experts, an Iranian body of scholars vested with electing a new supreme leader, after the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in an airstrike on Saturday. 

“The criminal American-Zionist forces attacked the Assembly of Experts office building in Qom a few minutes ago,” Iran’s state-affiliated Tasnim News Agency reported on Tuesday afternoon.

The Assembly of Experts is an Iranian body of 88 thoroughly-vetted notable scholars, that are empowered with electing, dismissing, and supervising the Iranian supreme leader. 

US-Israeli strikes targeted and killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday, ending his 36-year tenure as Iran’s ruler. After the late leader’s death, the task of electing Iran’s third supreme leader falls on the assembly. 

The Iranian state-affiliated agency added that the US and Israel had targeted the influential body’s Tehran compound a day earlier, as the leaders of the two Iran adversaries eye a potential uprising and regime change in the Islamic Republic. 

Unconfirmed reports after the attack have claimed that the strike took place during a meeting of the assembly to discuss, and potentially carry out a vote to elect Iran’s new ruler. 

The late Khamenei, 86 at the time of his killing, from Mashhad, was a leading opponent of the US and Israel, advancing the Islamic Republic’s ideology by supporting regional proxies against both countries, and calling for their elimination.

During the June war with Israel, Trump said Washington knew Khamenei’s location and urged Iran to surrender, while Israeli officials suggested he could be targeted.
 
Khamenei was elected supreme leader on June 4, 1989, following the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.