Ruthless revolutionary Supreme leader is defiant but has few good options left

When he appeared in public for the first time in five years in October, Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei had an uncompromising message. Israel "won't last long," he told supporters at a mosque in Tehran in a Friday sermon.

- Jason Burke

"We must stand up against the enemy while strengthening our unwavering faith," Iran's supreme leader told the gathering.

Days before, Israel had killed Hassan Nasrallah, the veteran secretary general of Hezbollah. The assassination was a personal blow to Khamenei, 84, who had known Nasrallah for decades.

Israel's air offensive against Iran has prompted more defiance, as well as missiles and drones launched at Tel Aviv, but neither appear likely to stop the attacks.

Khamenei now has few good options – a situation this careful, pragmatic, conservative and ruthless revolutionary has always sought to avoid.

Born the son of a minor cleric in Mashhad, the eastern shrine city, Khamenei took his first steps as a radical in the febrile atmosphere of the early 1960s. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah, had launched a massive reform project largely rejected by the clergy. As a young religious student in Qom, Khamenei had soaked in both the traditions of Shia Islam and the new thinking of the emerging leader of the conservative opposition, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. By the late 60s, Khamenei was running secret missions for Khomeini, who had been exiled, and organising Islamist activist networks.