It was a move to stop the weeks of guesswork. On May 25, 2026, Iran said outright that Ayatollah Khamenei had only minor wounds from those strikes. A spokesman for the Health Ministry made it clear: he needed ‘one or two stitches’ at most, and the 56-year-old is as active as ever, public appearances be damned.
Why the health update matters now
You won’t have seen Mojtaba Khamenei in public since he was put in charge on March 8, after his father, Ali Khamenei, was killed in the strikes. With tensions in the region running high, that kind of absence is enough to start some stories and make people wonder if the top of the tree in Iran is holding up.
This is a rare time for them to put something on the record. For a while, they have been saying he is hard at work behind the scenes, but without much in the way of details on how he is faring or what he went through.
What the Health Ministry described
Hossein Kermanpour of the Health Ministry laid out exactly what happened on the day of the attack and in the hours after. He says the leader came into a Tehran hospital with some of the others who were wounded at about 1:00 p.m. on Feb. 28 and was in the operating room before long.
‘Nothing of any consequence has happened, aside from some surface-level damage to the face, head and legs that didn’t call for an amputation or anything like it,’ Kermanpour put it. Medically speaking, it was not a big deal and he didn’t need more than a couple of stitches to put him right.
He was in the middle of a fast when it all went down, Kermanpour noted. ‘He would not break it and held on until iftar, which in itself is a sign of good health.’ They let him go around 2:00 a.m. on March 1. As for where he made for after the hospital, the spokesman did not say.
Silence, rumours, and rare assurances
Back in March, Pete Hegseth put out word that Khamenei was ‘believed to be alive, wounded and disfigured’. It was a line Iranian officials left to hang for a good few weeks. Now, with the Health Ministry’s input, you have a more thorough rebuttal to that sort of thing.
They have been at pains to say he is still running the show. This latest medical report is just another way of underlining that, while also facing up to the fact that people have been asking to see him.
Signals of activity behind closed doors
Even with the low profile, the authorities will have you believe he is in meetings. President Masoud Pezeshkian said as much on May 7, noting he and the leader were in talks for two and a half hours.
Then there are the senior military types who have been in to see him. In one case, he was reported to have handed down ‘new directives and guidance for the continuation of operations to confront the enemy’.
Key dates in the timeline
Here is how the officials have put the pieces in order:
– Feb 28: In the hospital by 1:00 p.m.
– March 1: Out of there at 2:00 a.m.
– March 8: Takes on the role of supreme leader.
– May 7: A meeting runs for two and a half hours.
What the update changes
The bottom line from the Health Ministry is whether the new leader can do his job after the 28th. Their answer is plain: the harm was skin-deep, the fix was simple, and he is still in the driver’s seat.
That is of some import to people in Iran and those watching from the outside. The strikes on Feb. 28 were a major turning point in the Middle East, and they left a lot of room for uncertainty and worry about a wider war inside Iran.
What to watch next
No one has put a date on when we might see Mojtaba Khamenei in public. But they have made sure to let on that the meetings and the making of decisions are going on as usual.
Expect more of the same in the way of statements and confirmations of his doings. In the meantime, the Health Ministry has given us a no-nonsense account to make up for the fact that he has been out of sight.
