Iran’s former foreign minister was nearly assassinated at his home in Tehran. His wife was killed. He’s in critical condition.
The NYT reports he was secretly brokering a possible meeting between Iranian officials and JD Vance through Pakistan.
Someone just tried to kill the man running the back channel. While the back channel was running.
Source: @clashreport, NYT
Iran just made it crystal clear: talking is now riskier than fighting pic.twitter.com/x8tup8TINR
— Bhiig_S Talks (@Bhiig_s) April 2, 2026
The assassination of senior Hezbollah commander Youssef Hashem at dawn on Wednesday has laid bare signs of security breaches the group had previously said it had resolved before the latest war.
It has also exposed a mix of advanced techniques and what sources describe as Israeli data originating from Iran, alongside the persistent role of human intelligence in tracking targets, security sources and experts told Asharq Al-Awsat.
Since the war began on March 2, Israel has carried out a string of assassinations targeting Hezbollah and Revolutionary Guards commanders on Lebanese soil, most notably Hashem, who was killed in a missile strike on a parking garage in the Jnah area on the outskirts of Beirut.
A senior Iranian diplomat gets hit at home, wife dead, while he’s allegedly running a backchannel to JD Vance through Pakistan, and people still want to pretend talks are “ongoing.” No. This is the message. Talking is now riskier than fighting. You try to open a channel, you become the target. That is not miscommunication, that is enforcement. Someone just made it clear they would rather burn the whole thing down than let a deal happen, and anyone carrying messages is now in the crosshairs. This is how diplomacy dies in real time.