Israel Kills 2 Iran Security Chiefs; Missiles Hit Israel
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- Israel killed two senior Iranian security officials — Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, and Gen. Gholam Reza Soleimani, head of the Revolutionary Guard's Basij force — in what the source calls a major blow to Iran's leadership during what it describes as Iran's greatest test in decades.
- Larijani had been considered one of the most powerful figures in Iran since Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in an airstrike on the first day of the war, making the strike a direct decapitation of wartime decision-making.
- Iran launched a barrage of missiles toward Israel on Wednesday (March 18, 2026), with sirens sounding across central Israel and loud booms heard in Tel Aviv, according to the source.
- Magen David Adom (Israel's medical service) said two people were killed in Ramat Gan, a district east of Tel Aviv, from the Iranian strikes — the first named Israeli fatalities in the source's account of the retaliation.
- Trump said he had demanded that roughly half a dozen countries send warships to ensure ships can pass through the strait, complaining that the U.S. is not getting support "despite the fact that almost every country strongly agreed with what we are doing, and that Iran cannot" secure a nuclear weapon.
- Oil prices were rising as Trump made the warships demand, tying the military escalation directly to energy-market disruption rather than treating the strait and the missiles as separate threads.
Why it matters: The killing of Iran's security council secretary and the Basij chief collapses a layer of wartime command structure, and Iran's same-day missile retaliation that killed two civilians in Ramat Gan confirms the war is now producing direct state-on-state civilian casualties in Israeli population centers. Trump's public demand for half a dozen allied navies to secure the strait, paired with rising oil prices, shows Washington is no longer able or willing to guarantee the chokepoint unilaterally.
