Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei has died, a few weeks after slogans of ‘Death to Khamenei’ echoed on the streets of Iran. On this week’s Point Blank, HT’s executive editor, Shishir Gupta The joint US-Israeli attacks, which effectively ousted the Middle East’s most controversial regime, decodes as collateral damage to Tehran’s vendetta with the Gulf states and the implosion of a region that is teetering on the brink, especially since Hamas’s October 7 attacks, which targeted Israeli civilians.
Gupta, during conversation with senior anchor Ayesha Verma This brings another important perspective… that India is watching closely from the sidelines, bracing for economic shocks and a possible mass evacuation of its diaspora.
Khamenei’s assassination
February 28, 2026 – a day that will go down in history as the day Iran lost the fight against the Trump and Netanyahu administration. This coordination killed the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and more than 40 prominent members of Iran’s leadership. He argues that the operation was “very successful” militarily because it decapitated Iran’s top leadership and destroyed its air defenses, allowing American and Israeli aircraft to “operate quite freely” in Iranian airspace. And, crucially, the path had already been paved once during the 12-Day War between Iran and Israel in June 2025… a conflict into which the US stepped in with its own and highly lethal B2 bombers. This led the West to dub it ‘a major blow to Tehran’s nuclear programme’. However, the issue remained in limbo as assessments following the attacks did not accurately confirm the level of destruction. America Claimed to be the reason. Iran’s three nuclear sites, Isfahan, Natanz and Ford, were at the center of a months-long debate, centered around one big question – had Iran’s capability to produce nuclear weapons been completely destroyed?
For Tehran and Washington alike, this is not a limited punitive action, but a stepping stone to regime change, not just counter-terrorism or nuclear withdrawal. donald trump Publicly indicated an operation lasting “four weeks”, but Gupta underlined that replacing a strong clerical order, supported by the IRGC and the Quds Force, would be much more difficult than destroying command bunkers or missile sites. He says the pro-Khamenei network remains active on the ground; Any change would require Iranian protesters or rival factions to produce a credible moderate leadership with which outside powers can work.
Iran’s retaliation: projectiles, proxies and panic
In response, Iran has launched long-range munitions bombardment of ballistic missiles and Shaheed-136 kamikaze drones – with a range of approximately 2,000 kilometers – against US-allied targets throughout the Middle East. Gupta says the attacks have affected or targeted Dubai and Abu Dhabi. KuwaitBahrain, Saudi Arabia and Qatar notably spared Oman, which had acted as mediator. Inside Israel, he points to the recent attacks on Tel Aviv and Beit Shemesh, where a missile strike killed eight people after penetrating air defenses.
Yet he stressed that footage of fireballs on Gulf horizons is often misleading. According to their statement, “99%” of incoming projectiles aimed at major Gulf centers are intercepted by layered anti-ballistic systems; What residents see – and fear – is the burning debris of destroyed missiles raining down on most cities. There are some exceptions, notably Kuwait and Bahrain where some weapons “arrived”, but Gupta’s main point is that the region’s multi-billion-dollar missile shield is functioning largely as designed.
In parallel with direct attacks, Iran has activated its proxy network. Hezbollah has been intensifying fire on northern Israel, prompting heavy Israeli retaliation in Lebanon. Gupta warned that the next phase will likely see more Houthi activity red sea and the Gulf of Aden – following months of attacks on shipping – while Hamas and other Iran-aligned groups seek opening up despite being hit hard in earlier Israeli campaigns.
Why is the Gulf in Iran’s cross-hairs?
When Verma presses him on why the Sunni states of the Gulf are bearing the brunt of Iranian fire, Gupta moves beyond sectarian narratives to a story of status, economics and historical rivalries. They remember that 7th October 2023 Hamas The attack on Israel coincided with advanced plans for the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), a project linking India, the Gulf monarchies and Europe that promised to reshape trade routes and investment flows. He says those plans were effectively scuppered by the war in Gaza.
Today, under Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE has established itself as one of the world’s most attractive business hubs, attracting capital and talent from London to Mumbai; Under the leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia is pursuing an ambitious economic and social transformation. Gupta suggests that these “upstart” Bedouin monarchies are unstable rivals to the heirs of the old Ottoman and Persian imperial traditions – modern Turkey and the Islamic republics of Iran, which are reshaping the Arab and wider Islamic world in a manner that is not limited to the Arab world. tehran And Ankara is not completely in control.
In that framework, the attacks on Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar serve a dual purpose: to economically harm rising competitors and to send a warning to tourist centers that there will be a price to pay for siding with Washington. He argues that Iran is trying to present itself as the leader not only of the Shia world but of the broader Ummah, while the Turkish leadership nurtures its own neo-Ottoman ambitions. The likely response, Gupta estimates, is a gradual move toward some form of joint Gulf defense architecture to deal with any and all missile and drone threats that may arise in the future.
Hormuz, oil and the Indian diaspora
Perhaps the biggest consequential step globally is to shut it down, legally or de facto, says Gupta. strait of hormuz and Iranian attacks on tankers using drones. About a fifth of the world’s oil and a significant portion of LNG flow through this narrow choke point, so even a partial disruption is already sending crude prices higher and putting a “risk premium” on each barrel shipped. Rerouting ships around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope would add weeks to voyages, sharply increase freight and insurance costs and increase inflation around the world – also known as the cost of war.
For India, a major energy importer with nearly nine million citizens living and working in the Gulf and West Asia, the stakes are especially high. Gupta says Prime Minister Narendra Modi chaired a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) to review scenarios ranging from oil shock to evacuation contingencies. He describes the Indian diaspora as “hard-working, not polarized, not radicalized” and says the Navy and Air Force are ready to begin evacuation operations as soon as the air corridors and sea routes are safe enough.
Currently, a large part of West Asian airspace, including parts of the UAE, has been intermittently closed or heavily restricted, leaving Indian travelers stranded in hub airports like Dubai and Doha. Gupta believes that as both Israel and Iran run up against the limited limits of their missile and drone stockpiles, the pace of attacks will eventually slow, allowing air routes to reopen at least temporarily – but he warns that the region will remain under threat for the foreseeable future.
Battlefield Lessons: Humint, Drones, and Preemption
Stepping back from the geopolitics of it all, Gupta highlights three military and ideological lessons. First is the centrality of human intelligence. The February attacks on Iran relied not only on satellites and electronic intercepts, but also on highly placed human sources who had learned the time and place where Khamenei and his top security aides would be together. He noted that for years Western services supported technical intelligence; This operation demonstrates that laborious, expensive HUMINT still has the most decisive impact.
The second is the transformation of the art of war itself. In Gupta’s view, the era of massed tank columns and infantry attacks in the form of vanguards is “over”; This is now the era of stand-off weapons, drone swarms, kamikaze UAVs and unmanned combat air systems backed by strong missile defence. Countries that cannot build or purchase layered anti-ballistic systems – and cannot maintain them under saturation fire – will struggle to survive on such a battlefield.
He refers to India Operation Sindoor While it was claimed that the Pakistani Army had launched about a thousand missiles and kamikaze drones… but they said that “hardly any” caused serious damage as Indian air defenses and counter-attacks worked as intended. Conversely, he points to successful Afghan drone strikes on Pakistan’s Noor Khan air base as evidence of Islamabad’s weak air defense grid.
Third, there is the generalization of preemptive and extraterritorial force. Gupta lists US actions in places like Venezuela, the current Iran attacks, Israeli actions across the region, Russia in Ukraine, and China’s pressure on Taiwan as examples of powers that insist on the preemption principle when they feel their core interests are at stake. In that context, he argues, moral lectures directed at India ring hollow when it considers similar action against cross-border threats; In his formulation, each state ultimately does what it must do to protect its security.
As soon as Verma signs, the picture that emerges is middle east Entering a long, unstable phase: a battered but not defeated Iran, US and Israeli forces pursuing an ambitious regime-change agenda, Gulf economies under missile attack yet protected by high-level security, global oil markets on edge and India balancing energy security, diaspora security and its own evolving security doctrine.
