Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei is dead, weeks after ‘Death to Khamenei’ chants filled Iran’s streets. On this week’s Point Blank, HT’s Executive Editor, Shishir Gupta decodes the U.S.-Israeli joint strikes that effectively toppled the Middle East’s most controversial regime, Tehran’s retaliation with Gulf nations as collateral damage and the explosion of a region that has been on the brink, especially since Hamas’ October 7 attacks, which targeted Israeli nationals.
Gupta, during his conversation with Senior Anchor Aayesha Varma brings in one more crucial perspective… that India is watching closely from the sidelines, readying for economic shocks and possible mass evacuations of its diaspora.
The Killing Of Khamenei
February 28, 2026 – a day that will go down in history as a day that Iran figuratively lost the battle against the combine of the Trump and Netanyahu administration. This coordinated killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and over 40 key members of Iran’s leadership. The operation, he argues, was militarily “very successful” because it decapitated Iran’s top leadership and tore open its air defences, allowing American and Israeli aircraft to “operate quite freely” over Iranian airspace. And, significantly, the path had already been carved once before, during the 12-day war that took place between Iran and Israel in June 2025.. A conflict that America stepped into with its very own and highly lethal B2 bombers. This spelled what the West liked to label ‘a big blow to Tehran’s nuclear programme’. This point, however, remained in limbo as assessments post the strikes didn’t exactly confirm the level of destruction that America claimed to have caused. 3 of Iran’s nuclear sites, Isfahan, Natanz and Fordow were instead at the centre of a months-long debate with one big question at its core – was Iran’s capacity to build nuclear weapons completely dismantled?
In Tehran and Washington alike, this is no limited punitive action but the opening gambit in a push for regime change, not just counter‑terror or nuclear rollback. Donald Trump has publicly signalled a campaign lasting “four weeks,” but Gupta underlines that replacing an entrenched clerical order, backed by the IRGC and Quds Force, will be far harder than destroying command bunkers or missile sites. The pro‑Khamenei network, he notes, remains active on the ground; any transition would require Iranian protesters or rival factions to produce a credible moderate leadership that external powers can work with.
Iran’s Retaliation: Projectiles, Proxies And Panic
In response, Iran has unleashed barrages of ballistic missiles and Shahed‑136 kamikaze drones—long‑range loitering munitions with a reach of around 2,000 kilometres—against US‑linked targets across West Asia. Gupta says strikes have hit or targeted Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, notably sparing Oman, which had acted as a mediator. Inside Israel, he points to recent hits on Tel Aviv and Beit Shemesh, where a missile strike killed eight people after penetrating air defences.
Yet he stresses that footage of fireballs over Gulf skylines is often misleading. In his telling, “99%” of incoming projectiles aimed at key Gulf hubs have been intercepted by layered anti‑ballistic systems; what residents see—and fear—is mostly the flaming debris of destroyed missiles raining down on cities. There have been exceptions, especially in Kuwait and Bahrain where some weapons “got through,” but Gupta’s core point is that the region’s multi‑billion‑dollar missile shield is broadly working as designed.
Parallel to direct strikes, Iran has activated its proxy network. Hezbollah is intensifying fire on northern Israel, drawing heavy Israeli retaliation into Lebanon. Gupta warns that the next phase will likely see more Houthi activity in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden—building on months of attacks on shipping—while Hamas and other Iran‑aligned groups look for openings despite having been hit hard in earlier Israeli operations.
Why The Gulf Is In Iran’s Cross‑Hairs
When Varma presses him on why Sunni Gulf states are bearing the brunt of Iranian fire, Gupta goes beyond sectarian narratives to a story of status, economics and historical rivalry. He recalls that the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel coincided with advanced plans for the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), a project linking India, Gulf monarchies and Europe that promised to recast trade routes and investment flows. Those plans, he notes, were effectively frozen as war engulfed Gaza.
Today, under Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan, the UAE has positioned itself as one of the world’s most attractive business hubs, drawing capital and talent from London to Mumbai; Saudi Arabia, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is attempting its own ambitious economic and social transformation. Gupta suggests that for heirs to the old Ottoman and Persian imperial traditions—modern Turkey and the Islamic Republic of Iran—these “upstart” Bedouin monarchies are unsettling rivals, reshaping the Arab and broader Islamic world in ways Tehran and Ankara do not fully control.
In that frame, attacks on Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar serve a double purpose: economically damaging rising competitors and sending a warning to tourist hubs that siding with Washington carries a price. Iran, he argues, is trying to project itself as a leader not just of the Shia world but of the wider Ummah, even as Turkey’s leadership nurtures its own neo‑Ottoman ambitions. The likely response, Gupta predicts, is a gradual move towards some form of joint Gulf defence architecture to cope with any and all missile and drone threats that arise in the future.
Hormuz, Oil And The Indian Diaspora
Perhaps the single most globally consequential move, Gupta says, is the closure—de jure or de facto—of the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian attacks on tankers using drones. With roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and a significant share of LNG flowing through this narrow choke point, even partial disruption is already pushing crude prices higher and injecting a “risk premium” into every barrel shipped. Rerouting vessels around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope would add weeks to voyages, sharply raising freight and insurance costs and feeding into inflation worldwide – otherwise known as the cost of war.
For India, a major energy importer with nearly nine million citizens living and working across the Gulf and West Asia, the stakes are particularly high. Gupta notes that Prime Minister Narendra Modi chaired a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) to review scenarios, from oil shocks to evacuation contingencies. He describes the Indian diaspora as “hard‑working, not polarized, not radicalized,” and says the Navy and Air Force are prepared to launch evacuation operations the moment air corridors and sea lanes are secure enough.
At present, swathes of West Asian airspace—including parts of UAE—have been intermittently closed or heavily restricted, stranding Indian travellers in hub airports like Dubai and Doha. Gupta believes that as both Israel and Iran run up against the finite limits of their missile and drone stockpiles, the tempo of strikes will eventually slow, allowing at least temporary reopening of air routes—but he cautions that the region will remain on edge for the foreseeable future.
Battlefield Lessons: HUMINT, Drones And Preemption
Stepping back from the geopolitics of it all, Gupta highlights three military and doctrinal lessons. First is the centrality of human intelligence. The February strikes on Iran relied not only on satellites and electronic intercepts but on highly placed human sources who pinpointed the time and place where Khamenei and his top security aides would be together. For years, he notes, Western services championed technical intelligence; this operation shows that painstaking, expensive HUMINT still delivers the most decisive impact.
Second is the transformation of warfare itself. In Gupta’s view, the era of massed tank columns and infantry assaults as the spearhead is “over”; this is now the age of stand‑off weapons, drone swarms, kamikaze UAVs and unmanned combat air systems, backed by robust missile defence. Countries that cannot build or buy layered anti‑ballistic systems—and sustain them under saturation fire—will struggle to survive in such a battlespace.
He cites India’s own Operation Sindoor where it was claimed that Pakistani forces launched around a thousand missiles and kamikaze drones.. But he says “hardly any” caused serious damage because Indian air defences and counter‑strikes worked as intended. By contrast, he points to successful Afghan drone attacks on Pakistan’s Nur Khan air base as evidence of Islamabad’s weak air defence grid.
Third is the normalization of preemptive and extraterritorial force. Gupta lists US actions in places like Venezuela, the current Iran strikes, Israeli operations across the region, Russia in Ukraine and China’s pressure on Taiwan as examples of powers asserting a doctrine of preemption when they perceive core interests at stake. In that context, he argues, moral lectures directed at India when it contemplates similar action against cross‑border threats ring hollow; in his formulation, every state ultimately does what it must to protect its security.
As Varma signs off, the picture that emerges is of a Middle East entering a long, volatile phase: a decapitated but not defeated Iran, US and Israeli forces pursuing an ambitious regime‑change agenda, Gulf economies under missile fire yet shielded by high‑end defences, global oil markets on edge and India balancing energy security, diaspora safety and its own evolving security doctrine.