Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former Iranian president, was killed in an Israeli air strike

Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — a polarizing hardliner who became the face of Tehran’s nuclear defiance and incendiary anti-Israel rhetoric — was reportedly killed in Israeli airstrikes during Saturday’s raids inside Iran.

A report issued by the Israeli media “Maariv” stated that Ahmadinejad was under house arrest at the time and was killed in a raid that targeted his home.

Ahmadinejad served as Iran’s sixth president from 2005 to 2013, rising from relative obscurity as mayor of Tehran to defeat establishment figure Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in a surprise 2005 runoff.

Critics at home and abroad described him as a confrontational ideologue whose economic management fueled inflation and whose rhetoric deepened Iran’s international isolation.

Ahmadinejad has become particularly notorious in the West for his rhetoric toward Israel and his comments about the Holocaust.

During a 2005 conference titled “A World Without Zionism,” he quoted Iran’s founding leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, who referred to Israel as “the occupying regime of Jerusalem” and a “disgraceful cancerous growth” that “must be wiped off the map.”

His defenders later argued that the translation of his remarks was controversial, while critics said his intent was unambiguously hostile.

In 2007, Ahmadinejad, while speaking at Columbia University in New York, declared that “there are no gays in Iran,” which sparked widespread laughter and derision.