Iran confirmed on Monday that an Israeli strike had killed the commander of the naval force of the Revolutionary Guards, who Israel had said was responsible for the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz.
A statement carried by the Guards’ Sepah News website said Alireza Tangsiri “succumbed to severe injuries” from the attack last week.
Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, who has been absent from public view since taking the role after the killing of his father and predecessor in US-Israeli strikes on February 28, extended his condolences in a message on Telegram.
In his message, he hailed Tangsiri as “a soldier of Iran and guardian of Islam” during the war.
His funeral will be held on Tuesday in the port city of Bandar Abbas, according to Sepah News.
Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz announced on Thursday that an Israeli airstrike had killed Tangsiri, describing him as the “man who was directly responsible for the terrorist operation of mining and blocking the Strait of Hormuz”.
Since the start of the war now in its second month, Iran has only allowed a trickle of ships to pass through the key waterway, sending global energy prices spiralling.
The Guards statement said he had been organising coastal defences when he was killed and vowed “that we will not rest until the enemy is completely destroyed”.
He is the latest top Iranian official to have been confirmed by Tehran to have been killed in the war.
Supreme leader Ali Khamenei was killed on the first day of the war on February 28 and the Islamic republic’s powerful security chief, Ali Larijani, was killed earlier this month, along with over a dozen other prominent figures.
Katz had said senior officers of the naval command were killed in the strike that killed Tangsiri, without giving further details.
Tangsiri had vowed earlier in March to “deliver the harshest blows to the aggressor enemy while maintaining the strategy of closing the Strait of Hormuz”.
A veteran of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, Tangsiri was one of the longest-serving senior figures in the force and one of its highest-profile faces within the Islamic republic.
He had been appointed by Khamenei in 2018 to head the naval branch of the Revolutionary Guards, whose task is to protect the Islamic republic from internal and external threats.
Under his leadership, the Guards’ navy had been significantly strengthened. In recent years, it has claimed responsibility for seizing numerous foreign vessels.
He was sanctioned by the United States in 2019 in a counter-terrorism related designation.
Israel and the United States have said they have dealt a major blow to Iran by killing top officials, but some analysts say the Islamic republic is still showing resilience and capacity to recover from setbacks.
