A top Iranian official who was involved in diplomatic outreach and indirect talks or messaging with the United States and Pakistani mediators was reportedly critically wounded in a US-Israeli strike. Kamal Kharazi, an 81-year-old senior adviser to Tehran and former foreign minister, lost his wife in the Wednesday strike on his home, state media has said.
Kharazi chairs Iran's Strategic Council on Foreign Relations and has been viewed as a potential backchannel negotiator involving Islamabad, but now he's been hospitalized with serious injuries, state media has also said.
"We have seen what looks like an assassination attempt against the former foreign minister, Kamal Kharazi … We don’t know why he’s been targeted. He has been gravely wounded, and his wife was killed," said an Al Jazeera correspondent in Tehran.
Iranian officials described to Mehr News Agency that Kharazi was overseeing outreach to Pakistan tied to a possible meeting with US Vice President JD Vance. A potential Vance trip to Pakistan was initially reported as possibly being in the works late last month.
But Middle East Eye has reported that Kharazi was not seeing much room for diplomacy as US-Israeli actions escalate to attacks on Iranian infrastructure and energy:
He told CNN in March, "I don’t see any room for diplomacy anymore. Because Donald Trump had been deceiving others and not keeping with his promises, and we experienced this in two times of negotiations – that while we were engaged in negotiation, they struck us."
If he succumbs to his wounds, Kharrazi would be the latest senior Iranian official killed since the war began.
In addition to Khamenei, top security adviser Ali Shamkhani, Revolutionary Guard commander Mohammad Pakpour, Armed Forces Chief of Staff Abdolrahim Mousavi, and Defence Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh were all killed on the first day of the war.
Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, was killed on 17 March, along with his son and one of his deputies. Intelligence minister and head of civilian monitoring, Esmail Khatib, was killed in an Israeli strike a day later.
Some analysts and pundits have accused Israel in particular of trying to sabotage any US-Iran talks, as the Netanyahu government wants to see complete regime collapse in the Islamic Republic.
Israel has also stood accused of seeking to create the conditions to lure the White House into authorizing 'limited' strikes which would inevitably become an open-ended war with no timeline.