Jennifer Griffin@JenGriffinFNC
US official confirms to Fox that US believes Khamenei and 5-10 top Iranian leaders killed in initial Israeli strike on compound; agree with Israel’s intelligence assessment.
A senior US defense official tells me that the US government agrees with the Israeli assessment that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead, along with 5-10 other top Iranian leaders who were all meeting at a compound in Tehran Saturday morning. The top IRGC commander also killed.
Multiple sources tell me that the timeline for the strike had to be moved up based on intelligence and this “target of opportunity.”
“There was a deliberate decision to accelerate the timeline,” officials told Fox.
That is why the US and Israel took the unusual decision to strike during the daytime to achieve the element of surprise and to target this meeting. Normally the US military would not launch an operation like this during the day. The meeting accelerated the timeline.
“This was a massive, wildly bold daytime attack,” a senior US defense official told me.
“It caught the senior leadership off guard, a Saturday morning during Ramadan and on Shabbat in the daytime.”
“We hit the senior leaders right out of the gate.” (Israel conducted the targeted strike).
