The Chain of Events That Killed Khamenei
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The strike on Tehran was years in the making. Like the Purim story, here's the hidden chain of events that made it possible.
The story of Purim didn’t unfold like binge watching a Netflix series. The events occurred over a span of a decade. No one living could have connected all the dots and see God’s guiding hand.
Only looking backwards in time can we put the pieces of the puzzle together and see the divine plan.
When Moses asks to see the Divine Presence, God responds: "You will see my back, but my face cannot be seen" (Exodus, 33:23). We do not see Providence as it unfolds. We see it only after it has passed.
We are living through such a moment now. Our task is to step back and see the whole picture.
The chain of events that led to last Shabbat’s joint American Israeli strike on Iran and the elimination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei did not begin on February 28, 2026. It began many years earlier. Here are just a few of the steps that brought us to this point.
Ivanka Trump converts to Judaism and marries Jared Kushner. Few could have imagined the future impact of that union. Yet it placed a committed Jewish son-in-law beside a future American president who would play a decisive role in brokering the Abraham Accords, releasing the hostages in Gaza, and negotiating with Iran.
Trump orders the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, Iran's most powerful military commander and the architect of its entire proxy network. Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, the Iraqi militias — Soleimani built them, funded them, and ran them. Iran calls him a living martyr. Iran's strategic brain is gone. Every proxy fumble, every coordination failure that follows traces back to this moment. You cannot replace a Soleimani.
In a ceremony on the White House lawn, the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco normalize relations with Israel. Jared Kushner brokers the deal. To many, it looks like a diplomatic photo op. It is actually the construction of a new regional architecture. For the first time, Israel and key Arab states begin sharing intelligence, coordinating security, and building economic ties. The Gulf states fear Iran as much as Israel does. That shared threat becomes a quiet bond. When the moment comes to act against Tehran, Israel is not alone in the neighborhood. The Accords helped to build the coalition.
Hamas massacres 1,200 Israelis, triggering a cascade Iran cannot control.
Mordechai says to Esther: "Who knows if it was not for precisely this moment that you came to royalty” (Esther 4:14). It’s no accident that you are in this precise position at this precise time.
In the summer of 2024, Trump survived an assassination attempt that nearly killed him. (He would survive a second one a few months later.) A bullet missed Trump's head by less than an inch; the difference between life and death was a single turn of his head a split second earlier. The shooter fired eight rounds; one clipped his ear, killed a bystander behind him, and left the next leader of the free world standing. Trump returned to office at the exact moment the chain would require someone willing to stand up to Iran.
Thousands of pagers carried by Hezbollah fighters explode simultaneously across Lebanon. The Mossad had spent years penetrating Hezbollah's supply chain, embedding explosives into the very devices Hezbollah believed were their most secure communications tool. Hezbollah's command structure collapsed. Nasrallah was eliminated. Iran's most powerful proxy was broken.
Step 7: September 27, 2024: Nasrallah is eliminated.
Hassan Nasrallah had led Hezbollah for 32 years. Under his command, Hezbollah became Iran's most powerful weapon, a battle-hardened army of 100,000 fighters sitting on Israel's northern border with a arsenal of 150,000 rockets. Israel dropped eighty bombs on his underground bunker beneath the Beirut suburbs. He was killed instantly, weakening Hezbollah immeasurably.
Israeli strikes demolish twenty of Iran's Russian-supplied S-300 air defense batteries. At the time, this reads as a tit-for-tat exchange. In retrospect, it removes the shield that would have blocked everything that followed.
With Hezbollah shattered, Assad lost his regional military support. Syria collapsed. Iran's primary land bridge for weapons into Lebanon and Gaza was severed. Iran was now encircled in ways it had never been before. Israel was able to destroy Syria's air defense system, effectively providing it with undetected air access to Iran.
With Iran's S-300 air defenses already gone and its proxies dismantled, Israel struck Iran's nuclear facilities directly. The United States joined on June 22, bombing Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. This war also destroyed part of Iran's ballistic missile infrastructure. The first war cleared the skies. The second crippled the arsenal. February 2026 required both.
On February 28, intelligence confirmed Khamenei was aboveground at his compound in Tehran, gathered with seven members of Iran's top security leadership and a dozen family members. The CIA had tracked the meeting in real time. Israel struck. Within 60 seconds, in near-simultaneous hits across multiple locations, Khamenei was dead. So were the seven security chiefs, forty senior Iranian leaders, and most of his inner circle. Decades of state terror — the funding of Hamas, the building of Hezbollah, October 7 itself — traced back to one man. He is gone.
Purim is not a story of instant miracles. It’s a story of patient preparation and hidden alignment, events that only in hindsight reveal themselves as a single, perfectly constructed sequence.
Looking back at the events of ancient Persia, and now in modern Persia, namely Iran, we can see that these are not isolated events, but rather carefully crafted chapters of one story being written by a single Author.
May we merit to see its completion and give thanks to God whose hidden hand has been orchestrating events all along.
Victory!
All honour, respect and glory to the IDF!
HaShem be praised!