We need to start with a correction, and we are going to make it without flinching because that is what we do here. In our last update, we held the line on Khamenei’s death. We said we would not call it confirmed based on the word of a man who spews demonstrable bullshit like Old Faithful spews water — on schedule, under pressure, and regardless of what’s actually true. We said we would not call it confirmed simply because a compound was reduced to rubble. After all, the East Wing of the Very White House is a pile of rubble — not from enemy fire, but because everything Dicktater Don touches eventually turns to trumpshit, and because his pathological need to slap his name on every institution he can get his tiny hands on tends to leave things structurally unsound. The Trump White House renovation project is its own special category of destruction. And yet somehow, Dicktater Don and Melanomia remain very much alive and presumably still surrounded by shrimp cocktail and sycophants in Mar-a-Lardo. Rubble, it turns out, is not a death certificate.
But overnight, the confirmation we were waiting for arrived. And it did not come from Truth Social.
Iranian state media agency Press TV confirmed on X that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been “martyred.” Iranian state television confirmed it independently. Khamenei, 86, was killed in a strike on his office in Tehran. His daughter, his son-in-law, and his grandson were also killed in the attack. Iran has declared 40 days of mourning.
When Iran’s own state media says it, we say it. Khamenei is dead. We were right to wait. We are not too proud to update. This is what accountability to facts looks like — and it looks nothing like a man in a baseball cap posting in capital letters from a golf resort at 3 in the afternoon.
Now for everything else that happened while you were trying to sleep, which, if you managed any at all, you are a stronger person than most of us.
The death toll at Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab is no longer 85. The governor of Hormozgan province confirmed 108 people killed and at least 92 wounded, with an unspecified number still trapped under rubble. One hundred and eight. Saturday morning it was 57. Then 85. Now 108, with girls still under the wreckage. We will update this number every time it moves. We will not stop saying their school’s name. We will not stop counting.
The overall Iranian death toll is now over 200 across 24 provinces, with roughly 700 wounded. And the strikes did not stop overnight. Israel says it destroyed Iran’s internal security forces headquarters in a second wave of strikes on Tehran on Sunday. The war is in its second day and it is expanding, not contracting, regardless of what the Blatherer-in-Chief told a morning news program between rounds of golf.
Three of ours are gone. Three U.S. service members were killed and five seriously wounded as part of the operation. Three flag-draped coffins are coming home to three families who did not vote on this war, whose representatives in Congress were not consulted on this war, whose President announced this war in a baseball cap on a social media platform he owns, at 2:30 in the morning, and then went back to monitoring it from a resort. Three families. We will say their names when the Pentagon releases them.
Iran is firing back at everything in range. Retaliatory strikes hit Israel, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan overnight. Eleven explosions were heard over Qatar on Sunday morning. Oman’s Duqm commercial port was hit by drones. An oil tanker off the Musandam coast was targeted, its twenty-person crew evacuated, four crew members injured. Six people were killed in Beit Shemesh in central Israel in a missile barrage. Dubai’s Jebel Ali Port — one of the busiest shipping hubs on the planet — caught fire from strike debris. And an Iranian drone reportedly caused a fire on the outer facade of the Burj Al Arab. The Burj Al Arab. The sail-shaped luxury hotel that has become the global symbol of Gulf wealth and stability. On fire. From a drone. In a war that is 36 hours old. The UAE has ordered all schools and universities to switch to remote learning through Wednesday. The Board of Peace members are keeping their children home from school while girls are still being counted in the rubble of Minab.
Then there is the Strait.
Iran moved to close the Strait of Hormuz overnight. Ships in the Gulf received warnings from the IRGC that vessels would not be permitted to pass. Twenty percent of the world’s daily oil supply. Closed. The man who stood before Congress four days ago and bragged about gas at $1.99 — a number that wasn’t even true then — has presided over the closure of the single most consequential oil chokepoint on the planet. The analysts who were modeling $5 a gallon as a ceiling are now being asked to take the ceiling off entirely.
Inside Iran, something genuinely complicated is unfolding that deserves more than a single sentence. Videos circulated overnight of Iranians celebrating Khamenei’s death in the streets of Karaj, Qazvin, Shiraz, Kermanshah, Isfahan, and Sanandaj — while security forces deployed and opened fire on the people celebrating. Simultaneously, protests denouncing the airstrikes and calling for retribution were reported in other cities. Both things are true, at the same time, in the same country. Iran is not a monolith. Its people are not its government. The celebration of a dictator’s death and the horror at a bombing campaign that killed 108 girls in a school can coexist in one nation, on one street, in one human heart. Anyone flattening that into a single narrative is not paying attention and is not to be trusted.
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian — a moderate who was among the few senior leaders to survive Saturday’s strikes — will lead alongside two other officials in a transitional period. Iran’s top security official Ali Larijani announced a temporary leadership council and warned that any secessionist groups attempting to act would face a harsh response. The Council on Foreign Relations said what needed to be said plainly: taking out the Supreme Leader is not the same as regime change. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the regime. The IRGC is still standing. It is still armed. It is still firing. Killing Khamenei did not end the Islamic Republic. It created a succession crisis inside an active war, and what fills that vacuum in the next 72 hours is the question that should be consuming every serious foreign policy mind on the planet.
Now, let’s talk about what the architect of all of this had to say for himself.
Note first that Trump chose to speak to CBS News this morning — which tells you something. CBS, now firmly under the Paramount-Ellison umbrella that has already demonstrated its willingness to kill 60 Minutes reporting and silence Stephen Colbert when the content gets uncomfortably close to power, is currently the safest possible mainstream outlet for a man who finds even Fox News insufficiently worshipful these days. He knows where the softballs live. He went there.
He told CBS that a diplomatic solution was “easily” possible. “Much easier now than it was a day ago, obviously,” he said, “because they are getting beat up badly.” He added that he knows who he’d like to see leading Iran but wouldn’t say who. “There are some good candidates,” he offered. The man who just bombed a country of 90 million people into a leadership vacuum is auditioning its next government from a resort in Florida. He used the word “easily.” Easily. While three service members are being transported home in flag-draped coffins. While 108 girls are confirmed dead in Minab. While the Strait of Hormuz is closed. Easily.
He also posted on Truth Social — in full capitals, naturally, because that is how very stable geniuses conduct wartime diplomacy — that if Iran retaliates harder, “WE WILL HIT THEM WITH A FORCE THAT HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE.” Iran was already retaliating harder when he typed that. The Burj Al Arab was already on fire when he typed that. Three Americans were already dead when he typed that.
Exclamation point.
The UN Secretary-General said the military action carries the risk of “igniting a chain of events that no one can control in the most volatile region of the world.” Pope Leo XIV — the Catholic Church’s first American pope — called from St. Peter’s Square for an end to the spiral of violence, saying that faced with the possibility of a tragedy of enormous proportions, he was appealing to all parties to stop before it becomes an irreparable chasm.
The first American pope is begging the American president to stop. The UN is warning of uncontrollable consequences. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. A hundred and eight girls are confirmed dead in Minab with more still under rubble. Three American service members are coming home in coffins. The Board of Peace has a port on fire and its member nations’ schools shuttered.
And the man who started it is posting in capitals from a resort, telling a network that killed its own journalism to protect him that it’ll all work out easily.
Are we great yet?
**Unfugginbelievable is an independent, reader-supported investigation into the things that make us want to flip a table — then flip it back over and document everything on it. Every claim is fact-checked. Every source is real. This is live and developing — we will keep updating as the situation changes. No ads, no sponsors, nobody telling us what to look away from. If this work matters to you today, buy us a cuppa at buymeacoffee.com/unfugginbelievable. We’ll drink it while the next filing lands.
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