There was no confirmation from Tehran that Shamkhani was dead, but the Israeli military said he was among several senior Iranian officials killed in a wave of US-Israel strikes on Iran.

The 70-year-old Shamkhani, an ethnic Arab who helped restore ties with Saudi Arabia in 2023, had held senior defence and security posts since the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled Iran's US-backed monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council for the past decade, he was appointed head of the newly established Defence Council following the 12-day war with Israel in June 2025.

The council was set up in August by the Supreme National Security Council, with the approval of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Masoud Pezeshkian.

He was appointed as the head of the body by Pezeshkian who sits atop both the Supreme Security and the Defence councils.

A rear admiral who had been credited with defusing Iran's years-long tensions with some Gulf nations, he was targeted during last year's war according to Iran but returned to duty shortly after.

The US-sanctioned Shamkhani also saw his son slapped with embargoes from the US Treasury over leveraging "corruption through his father's political influence... to build and operate a massive fleet of tankers and container ships".

The pinnacle of Shamkhani's diplomatic efforts came in March 2023, with a surprise Chinese-brokered announcement of restored ties with regional powerhouse Saudi Arabia.

Riyadh cut ties with Tehran in 2016 after protesters in Iran attacked the kingdom's diplomatic missions following the execution in Saudi Arabia of revered Shiite Muslim cleric Nimr al-Nimr -- just one in a series of flashpoint moments between the two countries.

The announcement of the Iranian-Saudi deal followed five days of previously unannounced talks in Beijing and several rounds of negotiations in Iraq and Oman in which Shamkhani had been involved.

- Saudi medal, US sanctions -

Shamkhani was born to an Arab family in Ahvaz, capital of Khuzestan, an oil-rich province on Iran's southwestern border with Iraq whose people have long complained of marginalisation.

A commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, he had served as Guards minister for a year at the end of that decade before the ministry was dissolved in 1989 and merged with the defence portfolio.

A navy chief who had concurrently commanded the IRGC's naval forces in the 1990s, the decorated officer went on to serve as defence minister for two terms under reformist ex-president Mohammad Khatami.

In September 2013, Shamkhani was named head of the Supreme National Security Council, replacing the ultra-conservative Saeed Jalili as secretary.

Before the most recent Iran-Saudi rift, in 2000 Riyadh awarded Shamkhani the Order of Abdulaziz Al Saud medal, the kingdom's highest honour, for his work as defence minister in bringing the two countries together.

Shamkhani was "a known and respected figure to us", and "a man of compromises that we can deal with", a Saudi defence official told AFP in April 2023 on condition of anonymity.

In January 2020, the United States slapped sanctions on Shamkhani and a dozen other Iranian officials following an Iranian missile attack targeting US forces in Iraq, a response to the assassination in Baghdad of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.

Shamkhani had also been involved in talks with world powers on Iran's nuclear programme and domestic issues.