On the second public day of Ali Khamenei's state funeral, three of his sons — Mostafa, Meysam and Masoud — prayed behind the coffins in the vast courtyard of the Imam Khomeini Grand Mosalla in Tehran, before millions of mourners. [1] The fourth son did not appear. Mojtaba Khamenei, named supreme leader after the February 28 strike that killed his father, has not been seen in public since that day, and he was not seen on Monday either. [2]

The funeral is built to run for days. The body will process through the Shia holy sites of Karbala and Najaf in Iraq and Qom in Iran before burial in Khamenei's home city of Mashhad on July 9. [1] It is choreographed, as Time observed, to project strength — the Islamic Republic's answer to the question of whether a state can absorb the killing of its founder-successor's father and continue. [2] The answer the choreography offers is: the leader is gone, the state endures. That is a legitimate claim. It is also a claim with a condition attached, and the condition was visibly unmet at the front of the hall.

The paper has tracked this absence as it hardened from rumor into fact. Its July 5 edition established that Mojtaba's disappearance had become part of the funeral story itself, a documented structural feature rather than a diaspora whisper. Earlier, on July 3, the paper found that the funeral pause was keeping the negotiation clock running, costing the Doha track at least a week whether or not anyone was at the table. Today's piece joins the two threads and names the consequence neither the strength frame nor the spectacle frame will state: a supreme leader who cannot appear cannot govern the one file Iran most needs governed.

The facts of the absence are not seriously disputed, even if their cause is officially unspoken. Mojtaba was appointed in the chaos after the February strike and has communicated only through written statements since — including, reportedly, the written authorization for the very memorandum of understanding that was meant to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. [3] People close to his circle describe injuries from the same attack that killed his father: facial disfigurement, damage to one or both legs. The U.S. defense secretary said in March that Mojtaba had been "wounded and likely disfigured." [2] Iranian state media has offered no account at all, which is its own kind of statement.

The mainstream framing treats the funeral as a display of continuity. On X, the reading fractures — a hidden succession crisis to some, an elaborate spectacle masking the real locus of power to others. Both camps argue about what the absence means. The paper's interest is narrower and, it thinks, more durable: not why Mojtaba cannot appear, but what a permanently unseen supreme leader can and cannot do. The office is not merely administrative. A supreme leader conducts nuclear diplomacy, arbitrates Hormuz policy, and — this is the part the Western frames omit — holds a religious legitimacy that requires public recognition. A marja who governs a generation of believers must be a face those believers know. Rule by written statement can sign a memorandum. It cannot lead a Friday prayer, receive a foreign delegation, or embody the continuity the funeral is staged to assert.

This matters because of what sits in Iran's inbox. The memorandum deferred the nuclear program into a 60-day window whose hardest conversations — enrichment caps, stockpile limits — have not begun and are losing days to the mourning. Those conversations require an authority that can be seen to own the outcome, because in the Islamic Republic's structure the supreme leader is the final signatory on exactly this kind of concession. A leader who can only issue paper can defer the file indefinitely, or he can authorize concessions no one can confirm he understood. Neither is governance. Both are the vulnerability the empty chair advertises.

There is a jurisprudential dimension the secular frames tend to skip, and it is not decorative. The supreme leader in the Islamic Republic is not merely a chief executive; the office rests on a claim of religious guardianship that presupposes a guardian believers can see and follow. A marja who leads a nation of the faithful is, by the logic of the position, a public man — one who prays where he can be watched, rules where he can be recognized, and embodies a continuity that a signature on a letter cannot carry. Rule by written statement may satisfy the paperwork of a state. It cannot satisfy the theology of this one. That is the deeper reason the empty chair unsettles more than a bureaucratic vacancy would: the office was designed to be occupied in public, and it is not being occupied in public.

The burial on July 9 is the next test with a date on it. Iran's official program does not list Mojtaba. If the man named to lead the country cannot attend the burial of the man he succeeded, the choreography of strength will have staged, in front of millions, the single fact it was built to conceal. The state endures. Whether its new leader can be seen to lead it is the question the funeral cannot bury.

-- YOSEF STERN, Jerusalem