Politics
The man whose power grew during Mideast war
When Israeli and US strikes martyred Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the start of the Middle East war, Iran’s security chief Ali Larijani became even more powerful than he had been for decades.
Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz claimed on Tuesday that Larijani had been killed, though the Iranian authorities have not confirmed his death.
Larijani had since the start of the war played a far more visible role than the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who has not been seen in public since he was appointed to replace his slain father.
The security chief, on the other hand, was seen walking with crowds at a pro-government rally last week in Tehran, in a sign of defiance against Israel and the US.
His killing, if confirmed, would be a major blow against the Islamic republic, undermining a key figure seen as capable of navigating both ideology and diplomacy.
Pragmatist
Adept at balancing ideological loyalty with pragmatic statecraft, Larijani was central prior to the war to Iran’s nuclear policy and strategic diplomacy.
Bespectacled and known for his measured tone, the 68-year-old was believed to enjoy the confidence of the late Khamenei, after a long career in the military, media and legislature.
In 2025, after Iran’s last war with Israel and the US, he was appointed head of Iran’s top security body, the Supreme National Security Council — a position he had held nearly two decades earlier — coordinating defence strategies and overseeing nuclear policy.
He later became increasingly visible in the diplomatic arena, travelling to Gulf states such as Oman and Qatar as Tehran cautiously engaged in nuclear negotiations that were ultimately scuppered by the war.
‘Canny operator’
“Larijani is a true insider, a canny operator, familiar with how the system operates,” Ali Vaez, the International Crisis Group’s project director for Iran, said before the Middle East war began.
Born in Najaf, Iraq in 1957 to a prominent cleric who was close to the Islamic Republic’s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Larijani’s family has been influential within Iran’s political system for decades.
Some of his relatives have been the targets of corruption allegations over the years, which they denied.
He earned a PhD in Western Philosophy from the University of Tehran.
A veteran of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps during the Iran-Iraq war, Larijani later headed state broadcasting IRIB for a decade from 1994 before serving as parliamentary speaker from 2008 to 2020.
In 1996, he was appointed as Khamenei’s representative to the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC). He later became secretary of the SNSC and chief nuclear negotiator, leading talks with Britain, France, Germany and Russia between 2005 and 2007.
He ran in the 2005 presidential elections, losing to populist candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with whom he later had disagreements over nuclear diplomacy.
Larijani was then disqualified from running for president in both 2021 and 2024.
Observers viewed his return as the head of the SNSC as signalling a turn reflecting his reputation as a conservative capable of combining ideological commitment with pragmatism.
Larijani supported the landmark 2015 nuclear deal with world powers which unravelled three years later after US President Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement.
In March 2025, Larijani warned that sustained external pressure could alter Iran’s nuclear posture.
“We are not moving towards (nuclear) weapons, but if you do something wrong in the Iranian nuclear issue, you will force Iran to move towards that because it has to defend itself,” he told state television.
Larijani repeatedly insisted negotiations with Washington should remain confined to the nuclear file and defended uranium enrichment as Iran’s sovereign right.
Larijani was among officials sanctioned by the US in January over what Washington described as “violently repressing the Iranian people”, following nationwide protests which erupted weeks earlier due to the rising cost of living.
Larijani acknowledged that economic pressures had “led to the protests”, but blamed the violence which ensued on foreign involvement by the United States and Israel.
- Ceasefire will remain effective from May 9 to 11.
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US President Donald Trump on Friday announced on social media that there would be a three-day ceasefire in the war between Russia and Ukraine from May 9 until May 11 to mark the end of World War Two for the Russians.
Trump had said after a phone call with Putin on April 29 that a temporary ceasefire was in the works. Putin announced a similar truce last year that lasted three days but was not agreed with Kyiv.
Trump said in a Truth Social post that the pause will include a suspension of all kinetic activity, and also a prison swap of 1,000 prisoners from each country.
“Hopefully, it is the beginning of the end of a very long, deadly, and hard-fought war,” he said, adding that there was constant progress in talks to end the conflict.
Russia announced a ceasefire for May 8 to 9 to coincide with commemorations of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II and a military parade in Moscow’s Red Square.
Ukraine announced its own proposal for an open-ended ceasefire that started at midnight on Tuesday (2100 GMT), urging Russia to reciprocate.
Officials said on Thursday that Ukraine’s top negotiator, Rustem Umerov, had arrived in Miami for a series of meetings with US representatives as peace talks on ending Russia’s war in Ukraine have stalled in recent months.
The US-brokered talks are deadlocked over Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. Moscow demands Kyiv pull troops back from parts of the region it has failed to capture in its four-year full-scale invasion. Ukraine says it will not cede land that it controls.
Moscow and Kyiv have both accused each other of violating ceasefires that each has separately declared.
The spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry says Tehran’s response to a proposal by the United States to end the war against the Islamic Republic is still under review, paying no heed to the Americans’ deadlines.
“The [US] proposal is still being reviewed, and once we reach a conclusion, we will announce it,” Esmaeil Baghaei told reporters on Friday.
Regarding some reports that the Americans have set a deadline for Iran to respond to the plan, he once again affirmed that the matter is still being examined.
“We are doing our own job and pay no attention to such deadlines,” Baghaei emphasized.
The Iranian spokesperson’s remarks came after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday that Washington expected to receive Iran’s response to a US proposal later in the day.
The US and Israel initiated an unprovoked war of aggression against Iran since February 28 after assassinating Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei and several high-ranking military commanders.
A Pakistani-mediated ceasefire was brokered on April 8, but subsequent talks failed to turn into an agreement due to Washington’s excessive demands.
Iranian officials have repeatedly criticized the United States for its approach to talks as the White House seeks to impose conditions rather than engage in genuine give-and-take.
In a Wednesday post on X, Baghaei elaborated on Tehran’s understanding of what negotiations entail, citing international law.
The concept of talks “needs ‘good faith’, then, meaning that ‘negotiations’ is not ‘disputation’; nor is it ‘dictation’, ‘deception’, ‘extortion’ or ‘coercion’,” he explained.
On the same day, Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf dismissed certain reports about a supposed impending arrangement between Tehran and Washington, describing them as misleading and part of recurring fake media narratives originating in the United States.
In a post on X, Qalibaf referred to allegations published by the US-based outlet Axios regarding such an arrangement, ironically describing them as “Operation Fauxios.”
He suggested that the circulation of such reports reflected a routine pattern in US media coverage, particularly stories attributed to unnamed sources that Iranian officials have repeatedly rejected as unfounded and have later been proven invariably wrong.
Airlines must not charge customers extra fuel fees after they have already bought tickets, the EU warned on Friday, as the aviation sector feels the pain from high energy prices because of the Middle East war.
“Airlines may adapt their published fares to the situation, but adding a fuel surcharge to a ticket after it has been bought cannot be justified,” EU spokesperson Anna-Kaisa Itkonen told reporters in Brussels.
Any changes post-booking can “raise issues under the EU’s unfair commercial practices”, she added.
In a document published on Friday on the energy crisis affecting the aviation sector, the EU said “any retroactive change of the price is excluded”.
“Airlines may not include terms and conditions which would allow them to increase the price of the ticket above what is advertised at the time of purchase simply because fuel was more expensive than they had accounted for,” the European Commission said.
The only exception is for package holidays if the seller has made it clear in the contract there could be a possibility of fuel-related changes to the costs.
In such cases, an increase of up to 8% is allowed, but if it is higher, the customer can accept or they have the right to cancel their booking.
Spanish low-cost carrier Volotea has been criticised in France where it is under investigation after demanding fuel surcharges from customers because of the energy shock from the war.
Gilles Gosselin, the airline’s France director, has defended the measure.
“The legality of our system has been confirmed by three independent law firms specialising in air transport and consumer law. The measure is transparent, it is temporary, and it works both ways”, up and down, Gosselin told AFP in France.
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