The murder of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the end of February 2026 was not an accident of war. It was not a bomb landing wide of some legitimate military objective. It was not the old official story about regrettable collateral damage, told with the usual mournful face and the usual refusal of responsibility. It was the deliberate killing of a head of state. The reporting in The Guardian was explicit that Khamenei was the object of a long-prepared joint American-Israeli operation, and that the strike which killed him also killed other senior leaders and members of his family and entourage in a coordinated “decapitation attack.” Donald Trump then removed even the last scrap of ambiguity when he told ABC, as reported by Fox News, “I got him before he got me.” Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, has since announced that any successor who continues Iran’s present policy will be “a certain target for assassination, no matter his name or where he hides.”
 
This matters for reasons deeper than the death of one Iranian ruler. I do not object because the person of a supreme leader is more sacred than the bodies of the girls killed when a school is hit, or the nameless civilians turned into statistics by air power. I object because the open adoption of assassination as a policy of government marks a collapse in the restraints that once made war, if never humane, at least less depraved than gang murder. When governments begin formally to hunt the heads of other governments, they do not civilise war. They degrade it. They turn conflict from a contest of states into a feud of criminal syndicates, and the eventual victims are not usually the guarded men at the top, but the ordinary people beneath them.