Israel struck the compound of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran on Saturday in a multimillion-dollar precision-guided attack, killing him along with a handful of top Iranian leaders, including the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. President Donald Trump announced Khamenei's death the same day.

The strike was part of a broader offensive. While Israel delivered the blow to Iran's senior leadership, U.S. Central Command confirmed that American forces deployed one-way attack drones in combat for the first time in history during what the Pentagon dubbed Operation Epic Fury.

A senior U.S. official described it to Fox News as a "wildly bold daytime attack." It landed on a Saturday morning during Ramadan and on Shabbat, catching Iran's senior leadership off guard. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz confirmed that additional strikes across the country were being carried out "to remove threats."

A New Kind of Battlefield

CENTCOM announced the historic deployment of its Task Force Scorpion Strike on X:

"CENTCOM's Task Force Scorpion Strike — for the first time in history — is using one-way attack drones in combat during Operation Epic Fury."

According to Fox News, the command added that the drones, described as low-cost systems modeled after Iran's own Shahed drones, were "now delivering American-made retribution." The irony needs no embellishment. The weapons Tehran pioneered and exported to its proxies across the Middle East have come home.

The dual-pronged nature of the operation reflected a deliberate strategic logic. Israel used high-cost, precision assets to decapitate the regime's leadership. The United States flooded the battlespace with cheaper kamikaze drones to overwhelm everything else. Iran's military, government, and intelligence sites were all targeted, according to an official briefed on the operation who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

A source told Fox national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin:

"We hit the senior leaders right out of the gate."

How the Strike Worked

Cameron Chell, CEO of drone manufacturer Draganfly, told Fox News Digital that the campaign likely paired advanced, costly assets against Khamenei's compound while U.S. forces used cheaper drones to overwhelm secondary targets across the country. The compound strike alone, he estimated, possibly cost tens of millions of dollars.

"That would likely have included expensive, precision-strike drones or manned aircraft in highly coordinated attacks to ensure success, not necessarily the lower-cost, one-way version of the suicide drones."

Chell suggested that if drones were involved in the leadership strike itself, they would have been sophisticated platforms like MQ-type or Global Hawk-type systems, not the expendable variants flooding secondary targets. The cheaper American drones handled the volume of work:

"The U.S. has this lower-cost alternative to hit everything at once, but then the very expensive, high-precision assets would likely have gone directly after leadership on Saturday."

The overall effect, Chell said, was "an excellent example of mass overwhelm at a new level."

Weeks of Invisible Preparation

Saturday's strike looked swift. It was not improvised. Chell suggested that Iran's defense and communication systems were likely compromised well before the first drone entered Iranian airspace.

"I'm sure there would have been days, if not even weeks, of work and preparation to take out those defense communication systems."

He pointed to electronic warfare, cyberattacks, and what he described as the multidimensional nature of the modern battlefield. The physical strike was the visible layer. Beneath it sat cyber warfare, misinformation operations, and electronic disruption that degraded Iran's ability to respond in real time.

"This was seemingly so swift because it was incredibly well-planned and coordinated by the U.S. and Israel on a massive level that's not been seen before."

That coordination is the story within the story. The United States and Israel executed a combined operation of extraordinary complexity, across multiple domains, in broad daylight, in the capital of a nation that has spent decades fortifying itself against exactly this kind of attack. Iran's layered air defenses, its dispersed command structures, its underground facilities: none of it mattered when the preparation was this thorough.

The End of a Regime's Mythology

For 45 years, the Islamic Republic built its identity around resistance and survival. It positioned itself as the power that could not be touched, the nation that exported revolution while remaining insulated from consequence. Khamenei was the embodiment of that mythology. He ruled for over three decades, outlasting American presidents, surviving sanctions, and navigating wars in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen through proxies that gave Tehran deniability and reach without direct exposure.

That era ended Saturday morning in Tehran.

The IRGC commander is dead. The supreme leader is dead. Iran's military and intelligence infrastructure absorbed strikes across the country. The regime that funded Hezbollah, armed the Houthis, equipped militias in Iraq, and supplied Russia with the very Shahed drones now turned against it has been struck at its head.

Dan Caine, the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was photographed monitoring American military operations in Iran alongside Cabinet members on Saturday, February 28, 2026. The image tells you everything about how seriously this administration took the operation: the top uniformed officer in the country, watching it unfold in real time.

What Comes Next

The regime is not gone. Iran is a nation of 88 million people with institutional layers that extend far beyond one man. But the leadership decapitation of this magnitude, the supreme leader and the IRGC commander killed simultaneously, creates a vacuum that cannot be filled quickly or cleanly. The IRGC's sprawling network of proxies now operates without the authority structure that directed them. Internal power struggles are inevitable. So are questions about whether the regime's remaining figures can hold the country together.

For the broader Middle East, Saturday's strike redraws the map. Every proxy militia, every state actor calculating how far it can push, just watched the most protected man in Iran die in a daytime attack that his entire security apparatus failed to prevent. Deterrence is not an abstract concept. It is a dead supreme leader in a destroyed compound.

The low-cost drones that overwhelmed Iran's defenses were modeled after Iran's own designs. The intelligence that located the leadership came from a preparation that the regime never detected. The strike landed during Ramadan, on Shabbat, on a Saturday morning when no one expected it.

Iran spent decades believing it was untouchable. Saturday proved otherwise.