Trump in the crosshairs: Iranians demand revenge for the killed Ayatollah.Image: EPA
Hardliners in Tehran are directly threatening the US President. Israel is said to have warned the USA – and Trump changed the plane due to security concerns.
July 10, 2026, 3:36 p.mJuly 10, 2026, 3:36 p.m
Thomas Seibert, Istanbul / ch media
“We will kill Trump,” read a huge poster in English on a building in Mashhad, the hometown of former Iranian regime leader Ali Khamenei. The poster was put up this week to mark the funeral of Khamenei, who was killed in an airstrike by the US and Israel in February at the start of their war against Iran. Above the slogan was an image of a clenched left fist – when Khamenei’s body was found, his left fist was said to have been clenched.
Iranian hardliners have been calling for weeks to retaliate for Khamenei’s death with the assassination of the US President and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. At the funeral ceremonies for Khamenei in Tehran, some participants carried banners that read “Kill Trump” and “Kill Bibi”; Bibi is Netanyahu’s nickname. Trump and Netanyahu “must not stay alive,” demanded the newspaper “Kayhan,” which reports to the new regime leader, Khamenei’s son Mojtaba.
Call for murder against Donald Trump in Tehran.Image: EPA
The US government is taking the threats seriously. When Trump began his journey home from Ankara after the NATO summit, he did not fly in the plane with which he had arrived, but in a plane that was equipped with modern defense systems.
Iran could have killed Trump in Ankara, says conservative politician and ex-officer Ezzatollah Zaghami: Trump was within range of Iranian missiles in the Turkish capital. Tehran only refrained from targeting Trump there out of consideration for its relations with Türkiye and other countries in the region.
Threatened by Tehran before
The US President had already been threatened by Iran during his first term in office because he had Iranian General Qassem Soleimani killed with a combat drone in 2020. Trump said this week that he was at the top of the Iranian regime’s hit list.
Tensions between Iran and the USA have been increasing again since Iranian attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz a few days ago. In response, US forces shelled Iranian positions on the strait, and Iran fired missiles and drones at US bases in Arab states. According to a report by the news site Axios, Trump’s government expects that the fighting could continue for a few more weeks. The mediators Qatar and Pakistan are trying to organize new talks.
Mostafa Khamenei (center), brother of the new leader Mojtaba, and other clerics mourn at the coffin of the slain regime leader Ali Khamenei, Mostafa’s father.Image: AP Iranian Supreme Leader Office
American secret services have been constantly registering Iranian threats against Trump for weeks, as the US broadcaster CNN reported. A few days ago, Israel warned Americans of a new and specific Iranian attack plan, according to CNN and the Wall Street Journal. Details were not known.
The Iranian regime has often carried out assassination attempts abroad. In July 1994, according to Argentine justice, Iranian agents killed 85 people in a bomb attack on a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. Two years earlier, four people died in an attack on Kurdish-Iranian opposition members in the Berlin restaurant “Mykonos”; The German judiciary blamed the Iranian secret service for this. Almost all EU states temporarily withdrew their ambassadors from Tehran in protest against the attack.
An assassination attempt on Trump would have much more serious consequences for Iran. Even if Trump survives an Iranian assassination attempt, the attack would likely trigger a new U.S. war against the Islamic Republic. According to CNN, this foreseeable consequence makes some in the US government suspicious: Why would the Iranian leadership order such an attack even though it does not want to start a new war?
According to CNN, the US government therefore believes it is possible that Israel, by warning about the Iranian attack plan, wants to encourage its ally Trump to strike harder in Iran again. Netanyahu’s government reluctantly joined the US-Iranian ceasefire in April and criticized the basic agreement between Washington and Tehran in June. (schweiztoday.ch)