Iran began week-long funeral ceremonies for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Friday, July 3, with his body lying in state at the Imam Khomeini Grand Mosalla in Tehran — more than four months after he was killed in joint US and Israeli air strikes in late February 2026. He was 86.

Iranian authorities project 15–20 million attendees across Iran and Iraq over the course of the ceremonies, with more than 10 million expected in Tehran alone, according to Al Jazeera. If those figures hold, the proceedings would rank as the largest state funeral in history as a proportion of a country's population. Representatives from more than 100 countries are expected in Tehran, notwithstanding a reported US pressure campaign — described by Press TV — that sought to deter foreign delegations from attending. A Turkish delegation was among those that paid respects at the Grand Mosalla on Friday. Some 600 foreign journalists have been accredited to cover the event.

Khamenei's body will remain at the Grand Mosalla through Sunday, July 5, alongside the remains of family members also killed in the strikes. Three further days of ceremonies are scheduled outside Tehran before the burial in Mashhad — Khamenei's hometown — on Thursday, July 10. Central Tehran is locked down for the duration of the weekend proceedings.

The Mood on the Ground

Large crowds in black filled the square outside Tehran's main mosque on Saturday, July 4, the second day of lying-in-state. Mourners waved Iranian flags and carried photographs of Khamenei, according to Reuters. Chants against the United States and calls for revenge were audible in the crowd, per BBC reporting.

Two attendees spoke to wire services in terms that framed the gathering as explicitly political. Reza, a 37-year-old professor, told AFP at the Grand Mosalla that mourners had come because they had promised Khamenei they would stand by him to the very end. Arash Rahimi, 40, told Reuters the crowd had come to avenge their supreme leader's blood, and that there was now a blood feud with the United States. Neither statement is official Iranian government policy, but the language of khunkhahi — blood vengeance — carries specific weight in Persian political culture and will be read carefully in Washington and Tel Aviv.

The War Context and the Peace Track

The funeral unfolds in an active conflict environment. The strikes in late February that killed Khamenei, as well as members of his family, set off a wider regional war that has not formally ended. Yet President Donald Trump said this week that Iran's government was "dying to settle" a peace deal following a preliminary agreement, adding: "We gave them a week off for a funeral because we're nice." The statement, reported by the BBC, was characteristically blunt — and its timing, delivered as millions of Iranians mourned a leader killed by US weapons, is unlikely to ease the atmospherics around any negotiation.

The gap between the two signals — a government described by Trump as eager for a deal, and a public channeling grief into calls for revenge — is the core political tension Iran's leadership must now manage. Whoever succeeds Khamenei as Supreme Leader inherits both pressures simultaneously: a population mobilized around martyrdom and a war whose costs make a negotiated exit rational. The Assembly of Experts, the clerical body constitutionally empowered to select the next Supreme Leader, has not publicly named a successor. That process, opaque by design, will shape Iran's strategic posture far more durably than the outcome of any single week of diplomacy.

The diplomatic attendance list itself carries signal. The US pressure campaign to thin the guest rolls appears to have had limited effect — a turnout from over 100 countries, including a NATO member in Turkey, gives Iran a counter-narrative of international legitimacy at a moment when the regime's domestic authority depends partly on projecting that it is not isolated. How individual governments calibrate that calculation, particularly in the Gulf and Central Asia, will be worth tracking as the succession process advances.