Mojtaba Khamenei did not appear at his father's state funeral, which opened in Tehran on 4 July. Iranian officials gave no reason for the absence. Western reporting attributes it to the standing Israeli assassination threat, after Defence Minister Israel Katz called him "a dead man" on 1 July, and to unhealed injuries from the February strike that killed his father1.
An emergency online Assembly of Experts vote installed Mojtaba as Supreme Leader in March, the first dynastic succession in the Islamic Republic's 47-year history; eight members boycotted it. The funeral was staged to wrap that contested vote in visible national grief for the man now holding the office. He was the one mourner it could not afford to lose, and it lost him.
Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen in public since 8 March and governs through sealed handwritten notes carried with a three-to-five-day lag. A leader who cannot attend the largest state occasion of his tenure still rests his authority on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran's ideological military, rather than his own presence. Katz's threat is genuine, but a Supreme Leader who must hide from it pays a domestic price in a state whose legitimacy runs through public appearance.
Qatar confirmed the Doha negotiating channel pauses for the six-day funeral, and Washington signed nothing new on Iran through the mourning week. Trump called the last Doha round "a day of very good meetings", a verdict the empty Federal Register does not back. The last US instrument remains General License X (GL X), the 22 June oil-sanctions waiver authorising Iranian crude sales through 21 August.
