On 28 February 2026, the first day of the war, the US and Israel launched a joint strike on the office of Iran's Supreme Leader. It resulted in the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several senior government officials.
The neighbourhood where the Supreme Leader’s headquarters are located is known as Pasteur. It is named after the Pasteur Institute of Iran, one of the Middle East’s most prestigious and oldest scientific research centres, which predated most of the governmental facilities, including the Presidential Office, the Supreme National Security Council, and the Assembly of Experts.
On 28 February, the medical centre was left unscathed by the massive bombing in the Pasteur neighbourhood. However, a month later, on 1 April and 2 April, US-Israeli bombing hit the Institute, levelling its headquarters and 13 source laboratories.
Founded in 1920, following a diplomatic agreement between the French and Iranian government, the Pasteur Institute of Iran is part of 33 institutes worldwide at the forefront of the fight against infectious diseases, named after the French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur (1822-85), father of the germ theory and microbiology.
"The main building is older than Israel," one of the Institute’s top scientists, who asked the name be withheld as scientists have been targeted by the US and Israel, wrote to me, adding "how dare they destroy such a piece of history?"
The 120-year-old building was on Waqf land, a religious endowment offered by the Qajar Prince and short-lived Prime Minister of Persia Abdol-Hossein Farman-Farma. It was a gift in the project to modernise Iran’s public health, which had been devastated in the first two decades of the 20th century by a great famine, the Spanish flu, and recurrent cholera and typhoid epidemics.
Amid ongoing disruptions to maritime shipping in the Middle East due to the closure of the...
