The paper's Saturday brief on the beginning of the Mojtaba Khamenei era treated his written Army Day message as one of two documents — the other being the kinetic attacks on Indian tankers — that landed on the same day. This brief reports the statement's full content, for readers who want it without the same-day IRGC events layered over it.

The message, read on state television Saturday morning and carried by Press TV and IRNA, was a written statement, not a public appearance. [1] Mojtaba, who has not been seen in public since his elevation on the fortieth day after his father's martyrdom, praised the Iranian army for having "courageously defended the land, water, and the flag to which it belongs" during the forty-day war imposed by the US-Israeli coalition. He invoked his father Ali Khamenei's work, beginning in the first decade of the revolution, to preserve the army "against ominous calls for its dissolution." The message's operational line — the line CNN's analysis called "a rare public statement" — was that the army's drones "strike like lightning against American and Zionist criminals" while its naval force "stands ready to make enemies taste the bitterness of new defeats." [2]

What the statement did not do is name Hormuz, name the US-Iran talks, name any specific operational objective, or offer any indication of Mojtaba's physical location, health, or availability for public appearances. The silence on Hormuz is notable because the Army Day message came within hours of the IRGC's kinetic attacks on two Indian-flagged tankers in the strait and IRGC Advisor Jabbari's Telegram post declaring the strait closed. Iranshahr's Ali Ansari, writing the day after the statement's release, argued that the message's operational ambiguity is consistent with the structural pattern the IRGC has used since Mojtaba's March elevation: communication through state-adjacent channels, written statements only, and no in-person appearances. [3] The question of whether Mojtaba is incapacitated, hidden, or simply operating through a new protocol remains unanswered by the message itself.

The full text ran approximately 900 words in English translation. The operational content is the paragraph quoted above; the remainder is a tribute to Iran's martyred commanders over the past fifty years and a reaffirmation of the army's constitutional role.

-- YOSEF STERN, Jerusalem