Intelligence officials in the United States and Israel are struggling to determine the condition and whereabouts of Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who has not been seen publicly since the February 28 strike that killed his father, according to a report.

Khamenei resurfaced only through a written statement released Friday for Nowruz, offering no video or audio appearance, further deepening uncertainty surrounding his status.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has asserted that Mojtaba may have been seriously injured in the same strike, saying he was “wounded and likely disfigured.”

His continued absence has led some observers to mockingly refer to him as “the cardboard ayatollah.”

Israeli officials say there is still no confirmation that he is actively leading the regime. “We have no evidence that [Mojtaba] is really the one giving orders,” a senior Israeli official told Axios.

A U.S. official echoed the uncertainty, questioning the unusual situation. “It’s beyond weird. We don’t think the Iranians would have gone through all this trouble to choose a dead guy as the supreme leader, but at the same time, we have no proof that he is taking the helm,” the official said.

President Donald Trump said Friday that there is effectively no leadership left in Iran to engage with diplomatically, as military operations continue to target key figures in the regime.

In his written message, Mojtaba Khamenei claimed that Iran has already dealt a serious blow to its adversaries, writing that Iranians have “dealt him (the enemy) a dizzying blow so that he now starts uttering contradictory words and nonsense.

“At the moment, due to the particular unity that has been created between you our compatriots — despite all the differences in religious, intellectual, cultural and political origins — the enemy has been defeated.”

He further argued that expectations by the United States and Israel that the Iranian government would collapse quickly were misguided, calling it a “gross miscalculation.”

According to Khamenei, the campaign against Iran was launched under “the delusion that if the pinnacle of the regime and certain influential military figures were to attain martyrdom, it would instill fear and despair in our dear people … and through this means, the dream of dominating Iran and subsequently dismembering it would be realized”, he said.

Instead, he maintained that “a fracture has emerged in the enemy,” he added.

U.S. officials say the lack of any visual appearance is troubling and out of the ordinary. One official described it as a “big red flag.

“We would have expected to see Mojtaba too in some form. He didn’t take advantage of the opportunity and tradition,” the person added.

Some analysts, however, caution against jumping to conclusions. Raz Zimmt, who heads the Iran Program at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, said there is no clear evidence that Khamenei is unable to function.

“Under the current exceptional circumstances, one should not expect him to appear in public, and it is possible that his injury does not even allow him to release a recorded video in order not to expose to the public the severity of his condition,” Zimmt said.