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Former Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharazi was seriously wounded and his wife was killed after their Tehran home was hit in a U.S.-Israeli airstrike on Wednesday.
Iranian media reported that the latest high-profile casualty comes as the conflict increasingly targets current and former senior officials across Iran’s political establishment.
According to Iranian newspapers Shargh, Etemad and Ham Mihan, Kharazi's home in Tehran's Ajouraniyeh neighborhood was hit in the strike. He was badly injured and hospitalized, the outlets reported.
State-affiliated Nournews also confirmed he was "seriously injured."
It was not clear whether the airstrike specifically targeted Kharazi or another site nearby.
Kharazi, 81, served as Iran's foreign minister from 1997 to 2005 under reformist President Mohammad Khatami. He later became a foreign affairs adviser to the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
He continued to serve as a foreign policy adviser to the office of the supreme leader after Ali Khamenei was killed on Feb. 28, the first day of the war, and was succeeded by his son, Mojtaba Khamenei.
In 2022, Kharazi told Al Jazeera that Tehran had "the technical means to produce a nuclear bomb but there has been no decision by Iran to build one," a statement that sparked widespread concern about the country's nuclear ambitions.
After the conflict began, Kharazi gave an interview to CNN in which he said, "I don't see any room for diplomacy anymore. Because Donald Trump had been deceiving others and not keeping his promises, and we experienced this in two times of negotiations, that while we were engaged in negotiation, they struck us."
The strike on Kharazi's residence reportedly also damaged an adjacent building in the Ajouraniyeh area.
According to an account circulating on Iranian social media, a building near the struck site housed offices linked to members of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and was connected to a pharmaceutical company that had been targeted a day earlier.
The U.S. and Israel have maintained an air offensive on Iran since Feb. 28, killing more than 1,340 people, including then-Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and top military commanders.
Iran has retaliated with drone and missile strikes targeting Israel, Jordan, Iraq and Gulf countries hosting U.S. military assets.
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