Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, a hardliner seen as a potential successor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed after his helicopter crashed in poor weather in mountains near the Azerbaijan border, officials and state media said on Monday.

The charred wreckage of the helicopter which crashed on Sunday carrying Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, and six other passengers and crew was found early on Monday after an overnight search in blizzard conditions.

Supreme Leader Khamenei, who holds ultimate power with a final say on foreign policy and Iran‘s nuclear program, said First Vice President Mohammad Mokhber, would take over as interim president, the official IRNA news agency reported.

“I announce five days of public mourning and offer my condolences to the dear people of Iran,” Khamenei said in a statement. Mokhber, like Raisi, is seen as close to Khamenei.

Under the Islamic Republic’s constitution, a new presidential election must be held within 50 days.

Footage from Iranian state television showed wreckage scattered on a foggy hillside, while separate images from IRNA showed Red Crescent workers carrying a covered body on a stretcher. All those aboard the helicopter were killed, a senior Iranian official had earlier told Reuters.

Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri Kani was appointed as acting foreign minister following the death of Amirabdollahian, IRNA said.

The crash comes at a time of growing dissent within Iran over an array of political, social, and economic crises. Iran‘s clerical rulers face international pressure over Tehran’s disputed nuclear program and its deepening military ties with Russia during the war in Ukraine.

Since Iran‘s ally Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, provoking Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, conflagrations involving Iran-aligned groups have erupted throughout the Middle East.

A long “shadow war” between Iran and Israel broke into the open last month with tit-for-tat exchanges of drone and missile fire.

State media reported that images from the site showed the US-made Bell 212 helicopter slammed into a mountain peak, although there was no official word on the cause of the crash. The dead also included the governor of East Azerbaijan Province and a senior imam from Tabriz city.

An Israeli official told Reuters it was not involved in the crash. “It wasn’t us,” said the official, who requested anonymity.

MESSAGES OF CONDOLENCE

The helicopter went down in Varzeqan region north of Tabriz, state news agency IRNA reported, as Raisi returned from an official visit to the border with Azerbaijan in Iran‘s northwest.

Raisi, 63, was elected president in 2021, and since taking office has ordered a tightening of morality laws, overseen a bloody crackdown on anti-government protests, and pushed hard in nuclear talks with world powers.

Messages of condolences poured in from Iran‘s regional neighbors and allies, including the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Jordan, Iraq, and Pakistan.

Russian President Vladimir Putin called Raisi “a true friend of Russia,” while Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he was “deeply shocked and saddened.”

There was less reaction from Western capitals, though the European Union and Japan expressed condolences.

Iran-backed terrorist group Hamas, fighting Israeli forces in Gaza with Tehran’s support, issued a statement expressing sympathy to the Iranian people for “this immense loss.”

Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group and the Houthi rebels in Yemen, both terrorist organizations, also issued statements praising Raisi and mourning his death.

Meanwhile, the exiled opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, described his death in a statement as a “monumental and irreparable strategic blow” to the Islamic Republic.

Rescue teams fought rain, blizzards, and difficult terrain through the night to reach the wreckage in the early hours of Monday.

“With the discovery of the crash site, no signs of life have been detected among the helicopter’s passengers,” the head of Iran’s Red Crescent, Pirhossein Kolivand, told state TV.

Earlier, the national broadcaster had stopped all regular programming to show prayers being held for Raisi across the country.

Video showed a rescue team, wearing bright jackets and head torches, huddled around a GPS device as they searched a pitch-black mountainside on foot.

HARDLINER, POSSIBLE SUCCESSOR TO KHAMENEI

In Iran‘s dual political system, split between the clerical establishment and the government, it is Raisi’s 85-year-old mentor Khamenei, supreme leader since 1989, who holds decision-making power on all major policies.

For years, many have seen Raisi as a strong contender to succeed Khamenei, who has endorsed Raisi’s main policies.

Raisi’s victory in a closely managed election in 2021 brought all branches of power under the control of hardliners, after eight years when the presidency had been held by pragmatist Hassan Rouhani and a nuclear deal negotiated with powers including Washington.

However, Raisi’s standing may have been dented by widespread protests against clerical rule following the death of 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in morality police custody, and a failure to turn around Iran‘s economy, hamstrung by Western sanctions.

Raisi had been at the Azerbaijani border on Sunday to inaugurate the Qiz-Qalasi Dam, a joint project. Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, who said he had bid a “friendly farewell” to Raisi earlier in the day, had offered assistance in the rescue.

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JNS.org – The collaboration between UNRWA, the U.N. agency solely dedicated to Palestinian refugees and their descendants, and the Hamas rulers of Gaza continues unabated.

Two episodes over the last week underscore that claim. On May 14, Israeli jets carried out a precision strike against a Hamas war room and weapons depot that was concealed beneath an UNRWA school in Nuseirat. Fifteen terrorists—10 of them members of Hamas’s elite Nukhba Force—were killed in the strike. Meanwhile, three days earlier, the Israelis released aerial surveillance footage of armed Palestinians in an UNRWA compound in the southern city of Rafah, where the IDF is facing off against four Hamas battalions. The video showed the gun-toting Palestinians milling inside the compound, from where they launched attacks on the gathering Israeli forces.

The intermingling of UNRWA facilities and personnel with Hamas and its nefarious aims has been a constant theme of Israeli messaging throughout the current war in the Gaza Strip. At the beginning of this year, it seemed as if other Western countries shared Israel’s concerns, with 18 of them, among them the United States, suspending funding to UNRWA. However, as the NGO UN Watch has documented, in the intervening period, nine of them have quietly restored their fiscal support. One of these countries was Germany, whose foreign ministry declared in an April 24 statement that UNRWA’s verbal willingness to implement the recommendations of an independent commission headed by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna was enough to turn the money faucet back on. Israel’s vociferous objections—pointing out that Colonna had elided Jerusalem’s claim that more than 2,000 UNRWA staff members retain ties with Hamas—made no difference to the Germans, nor to the Japanese, or the Canadians or the other six nations who resumed financial assistance to the agency.

In the midst of all this, UNRWA received an award from the government of Spain—one of the countries that has maintained its funding throughout the conflict triggered by the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel on Oct. 7. The spectacle of a U.N. agency that indulges a terrorist group, whose tactics include the mass murder and rape of civilians for the crime of being Jews, being feted like this is, of course, deeply regrettable. But looked at from another angle, it is highly appropriate.

The award presented to UNRWA director general Philippe Lazzarini by Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares during his visit to New York on April 19 inducted him into the “Royal Order of Isabella the Catholic.” The “Isabella” referred to here is Queen Isabella I of Castile, who ruled Spain alongside her husband, King Ferdinand II, from 1474 until her death 30 years later. In 1492, at the height of the Spanish Inquisition, Isabella and Ferdinand issued an order for the ejection of Spain’s Jewish population, estimated to have been 300,000-strong.

The king and queen’s announcement of the expulsion—known as the Alhambra Decree—is on display, fittingly, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Spanish Jews were given four months to pack up their belongings and settle their affairs, a chaotic and painful process that left Spain as a country economically and culturally impoverished. Sultan Bayezid II of the Ottoman Empire, who offered shelter to some of these Jews (among them my own family, who lived for centuries under Turkish rule in the Balkans), poked fun at the Spanish monarchs, questioning the judgment of those who would degrade their own kingdom only to “enrich ours.” In making that observation, Bayezid inadvertently grasped one of the more curious aspects of Jew-hatred—that its advocates will push for it relentlessly, even when it doesn’t suit their own interests to do so.

One of the more curious aspects of Jew-hatred is that its advocates will push for it relentlessly, even when it doesn’t suit their own interests.

Few institutions would be as receptive as UNRWA when it comes to Spain expressing pride in a monarch who deservedly has the reputation as one of the worst persecutors of Jews in their history. The history of antisemitism has been captured in a simple formula: You have no right to live among us as Jews; you have no right to live among us; you have no right to live. Queen Isabella’s place on this spectrum is evident and unarguable. Equally, Hamas belongs there no less. The Iranian-backed organization doesn’t like Jews, doesn’t like Jews living among Muslims and doesn’t like Jews being alive at all. They may be separated by seven centuries, but Isabella and UNRWA, which has actively promoted Hamas-style antisemitism in its schools, have a huge amount in common when it comes to the Jewish people.

Were Hamas to succeed in its goal of eliminating Israel as a sovereign state, we might well expect an announcement to that end not dissimilar to the Alhambra Declaration. Those Jews who survived the destruction of their only state would, if they were lucky, be given four months to liquidate their assets, hand over their properties to “returning” Palestinian refugees and make their way out of the country. No doubt some would figure out a way to stay—probably by hiding their Jewish identities and attempting to integrate with the rest of the population, as those Jews who remained in Spain after the expulsion did. UNRWA, by a twist of historical irony, might even offer to shepherd their exit within parameters set by Hamas that would prevent forever any possibility of returning. While such a scenario may seem improbable today, if history has taught us anything, it’s that it’s not improbable tomorrow.

The history of antisemitism has been captured in a simple formula: You have no right to live among us as Jews; you have no right to live among us; you have no right to live.

Fundamentally, the problem here is that too many states—not just Turkey, Iran, Russia, North Korea, China and other citadels of authoritarian rule, but democracies as well—believe that the way to convince the Palestinians to accept peace is by kowtowing to their jealously guarded victimhood status.

By the end of this month, it’s likely that several European Union member states, including Spain and also Ireland, Malta, Slovenia and Belgium, will have unilaterally recognized an independent Palestinian state. Albares is one of the foreign ministers actively promoting the fiction that such a move will bolster, rather than undermine, the prospects for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel that will coexist peacefully.

Deep down, you have to believe that Albares knows that’s simply not true—that most Palestinians, as successive opinion polls since Oct. 7 have borne out, regard a state alongside Israel not as a final settlement but a step towards conquering the entire land “from the river to the sea.” These are the stakes that Israel has to contend with when it deals with diplomats and other foreign officials quietly sympathetic to the idea that the Jewish state shouldn’t be there in the first place.

Isabella the Catholic would be proud.

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JNS.org – Only in the world of the absurd can a despicable purveyor of terror, Hamas, carry out a brutal massacre, killing over a thousand innocent people, torturing, murdering and carrying out sadistic mass rape, over a space of just a few hours, and then run home to Gaza taking with them hundreds of hostages.

Only in the world of the absurd can the Palestinian representative organization that encourages, finances, supports and represents such murderers be feted and upgraded by the majority of member states in the international community.

Only in the world of the absurd can a group of non-democratic, terror-supporting states oblige the United Nations General Assembly by proposing a resolution that indulges in pampering a terror-supporting entity in a misguided and surreal demonstration of naïveté, skewed political correctness and acute hypocrisy.

Only in the same world of the absurd can 143 states parrot their support for what they blindly proclaim to be a “two-state solution” without really understanding what they are talking about out of ignorance and stupidity.

Only in the world of the absurd can the majority of the international community deliberately ignore the openly declared genocidal intentions of Iran, Hamas and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in their efforts to eliminate the Jewish state and kill all Jews. And this, while at the same time upgrading the Palestinian representation in the United Nations.

Lastly, only in the world of the absurd can all this happen at the same time as incited and handsomely financed and organized groups of violent, hysterical, antisemitic demonstrators occupy campuses and town centers in U.S. and European cities, calling for the elimination of the only Jewish state.

Shooting blanks for statehood

Despite the artificial hype surrounding this resolution, the bottom line is that this upgrade does not grant the Palestinians the status of statehood or U.N. membership that they wished to receive. The U.N. General Assembly has neither authority nor jurisdiction to establish states and grant membership status without Security Council sanction.

The sad naïveté and hypocrisy of those states that proposed and voted in favor of this abnormal new General Assembly resolution are evident in their stated determination in the body of the resolution to the effect that “the State of Palestine is qualified for membership in the U.N. in accordance with article 4 of the U.N. Charter.”

But the U.N. Charter article 4 requires that United Nations membership be open to “all other peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present Charter.”

One may legitimately ask if the self-respecting states voting in favor of this resolution, including Russia, China, Norway, Japan, South Korea, and Australia, and E.U. member states Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, France Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain, genuinely believe that the Palestinians are, or could be a “peace-loving state,” or is this just self-delusion, artificial political correctness or naive wishful thinking?

International law requires the fulfillment of universally accepted criteria for statehood, including control of a defined population and territory and enforcement of the rule of law, none of which the Palestinian Authority has ever fulfilled. This is in addition to the Charter requirement of being a peace-loving state, assuming responsible governance and the capability of respecting international obligations. Therefore, it is clear that this resolution is nothing more than a sad and miserable fiction, a sham.

Clearly, no element of the Palestinian political existence—neither the infamous and brutal terror organization Hamas nor the terror-supporting PLO and its Palestinian Authority—can seriously claim to fulfill such criteria.

Like all General Assembly resolutions, the resolution is not binding, only recommendatory. It does not represent international law and only reflects the political views of those states that proposed and supported it.

The various modalities listed in the resolution for improving the seating, establishing a speaking order of the Palestinian delegates in the General Assembly’s chamber and other U.N. bodies, and upgrading their participation in meetings and conferences are cosmetic, symbolic lip-service.

Despite its call for full Palestinian membership, the resolution distinctly denies and negates any notion of full membership in the United Nations. As such, the Palestinian delegation remains nothing more than an observer delegation, wherever and however they may be seated.

The resolution stresses that they have no entitlement to vote and have no right to membership in U.N. organs, including the Security Council.

The violations inherent in the resolutions

However, in the context of the Palestinian obligations set out in the Oslo Accords, this attempted change of status constitutes a serious and fundamental violation of the agreed obligation not to change the status of the territories pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.

The Palestinian leadership and Israel agreed that all outstanding issues, including the permanent status of the territories, must be resolved through negotiations and cannot be determined by unilateral action, whether in the United Nations or anywhere else.

Even the United Nations itself, in several resolutions, has given its endorsement to the Oslo Accords as the only agreed-upon means to resolve the Israel-Palestinian dispute.

Similarly, the European Union, Russia, Egypt and Norway, together with the United States, are signatories to the Oslo Accords as witnesses. A vote in favor of this new resolution by these witnesses undermines the Oslo Accords and is contrary to the accepted obligations of states and organizations that witness international agreements.

Indeed, by supporting this new resolution, they seek to bypass the requirements in the Oslo Accords for the negotiation of the permanent status of the territories and attempt to prejudge the outcome of any such negotiations unilaterally.

Despite this resolution’s artificial and ineffectual symbolic and cosmetic aspects, the overall result of the exercise is nevertheless grave and unfortunate. It will be seen by Hamas and the Palestinian leadership as a green light from the international community for them to continue to support and conduct terrorism.

The regrettable message emanating from this resolution is that the international community is not just ignoring Palestinian terror against a fellow U.N. member state; it is encouraging it.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

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