US president signals willingness to engage with Tehran’s surviving leadership as strikes and retaliatory attacks intensify across region

• US-Israel war on Iran – latest updates

Donald Trump said on Sunday he was prepared to talk to what was left of the Iranian leadership in the wake of the killing of the country’s supreme leader by US-Israeli air strikes aimed at overthrowing the regime.

Trump was speaking as a second day of intense bombing of Iranian cities and Tehran’s missile counter-attacks sent tremors across the region and through the global economy.

An operation decades in the making took just 60 seconds to carry out, but some question its wisdom

The assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was the culmination of decades of painstaking intelligence gathering by Israeli secret services, with crucial technological resources and manpower provided over the last six months by the CIA and other US intelligence services, which culminated in a single concentrated burst of lethal violence to decapitate the Iranian regime, according to experts, veteran spies and officials in Israel and the US.

Khamenei was killed along with seven “members of the top Iranian security leadership who had gathered at several locations in Tehran” and about a dozen members of his family and close entourage in near-simultaneous strikes within 60 seconds, military officials in Israel said. Forty other senior Iranian leaders also died in the attack.