Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — a polarizing hardliner who became the face of Tehran’s nuclear defiance and incendiary anti-Israel rhetoric — was reportedly killed in Israeli airstrikes during Saturday’s strikes inside Iran.
A report by the Israeli media outlet Ma’ariv stated that Ahmadinejad was under house arrest at the time and was killed in a targeted strike on his home.
Ahmadinejad served as Iran’s sixth president from 2005 to 2013, rising from relative obscurity as mayor of Tehran to defeat establishment figure Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in a surprise 2005 runoff.
Critics at home and abroad described him as a confrontational ideologue whose economic management fueled inflation and whose rhetoric deepened Iran’s international isolation.
Ahmadinejad became especially notorious in the West for his rhetoric toward Israel and his comments about the Holocaust.
During a 2005 conference titled “A World Without Zionism,” he quoted Iran’s founding leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, who had referred to Israel as “the occupying regime of Jerusalem” and a “disgraceful cancerous growth” that “must be wiped off the map.”
His defenders later argued that translations of his remarks were disputed, while critics said the intent was unmistakably hostile.
In 2007, speaking at Columbia University in New York, Ahmadinejad declared that there were “no homosexuals in Iran,” prompting laughter from the audience and widespread ridicule.
