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Kamal Kharazi, who served as Iran's foreign minister for eight years and remained one of the country's most prominent diplomatic figures, died Thursday from wounds he sustained in a U.S.-Israeli strike on his Tehran residence nine days earlier, Iranian state media reported. He was 81. His wife was killed in the same attack.
The Mehr and ISNA news agencies reported on Telegram that Kharazi, "who was injured in a terrorist attack carried out by the American-Zionist enemy a few days ago, died a martyr tonight." His death adds to a growing list of senior Iranian military and political figures killed since U.S.-Israeli strikes began on February 28.
Kharazi's four-decade career in Iranian statecraft began in the years immediately following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. He served as vice minister for political affairs at the foreign ministry and as a military spokesman during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.
He later represented Iran at the United Nations in New York, before being appointed foreign minister under reformist President Mohammad Khatami, a post he held from 1997 to 2005. At the time of his death, he headed the Strategic Council for International Relations, an advisory body attached to the foreign ministry.
His tenure as foreign minister overlapped with one of the more diplomatically active periods in post-revolutionary Iranian history, marked by cautious openings toward Europe and limited contact with Western interlocutors.
Kharazi's death comes as U.S.-Israeli strikes have systematically eliminated much of Iran's senior leadership since the start of hostilities. According to Iranian media, those killed include Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and a number of top military and political figures. Kharazi had been advising the office of the supreme leader at the time he was wounded.
The strike that killed his wife and critically wounded him targeted their home in Tehran on April 1. Neither the United States nor Israel has publicly claimed responsibility for the operation, and it remains unclear whether Kharazi was the specific intended target.
In his later years, Kharazi remained a publicly visible voice on Iran's foreign policy posture. In 2022, he told Al Jazeera that Tehran possessed "the technical means to produce a nuclear bomb," though he said no decision had been made to build one, a statement that drew international concern.
More recently, he was reported to have indicated that Iran had not entirely closed the door on indirect talks, even as he told CNN that he saw "no room for diplomacy" with the current U.S. administration. He had also been involved in Pakistani-mediated efforts to arrange contact between senior Iranian officials and U.S. Vice President JD Vance.
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