Esmail Baghaei

Esmail Baghaei Hamaneh (born 1975) is an Iranian diplomat who has been the Spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Iran since October 2024. He previously served as a senior assistant to the Iranian foreign minister from 2022 to 2024.

Baghaei holds a law degree and a master's degree in diplomacy and international organisations. He began his career at Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2001 as a legal officer at Iran's General Directorate for International Legal Affairs before serving as legal adviser in the Permanent Mission of Iran to the United Nations in New York City from 2006 until 2010. He was Iran's ambassador and Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the UN Office in Geneva from 2018 until 2022.

Early life and education Esmail Baghaei Hamaneh was born in 1975 in Yazd, Iran.

He earned an LLM in international law at Shahid Beheshti University, and a master's degree in diplomacy and international organisations at the School of International Relations in Tehran, Iran. Later he was a PhD candidate in public international law at the University of Tehran. He succeeded Nasser Kanaani. On 10 February 2026, he warned that if Iran were attacked by the United States and Israel, Iran would respond with crushing force.

On 28 February 2026, after it was reported (correctly) that Israeli airstrikes had killed Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei in Tehran, Baghaei falsely asserted to the press that Khamenei was "safe and sound".

On 19 March 2026, during the 2026 Iran war, Baghaei was interviewed by Sarah Ferguson on the Australian ABC Television current affairs program 7.30. In the interview, he accused the United States and Israel of "terrorist acts" for assassinating Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei and other top figures in Iran in what he called an "illegal war" against the country. He also said that Australia's military assets in the Gulf were legitimate targets for Iran to attack in self-defence, without regard to whether they were offensive or defensive Australian military assets, after the Australian Government had deployed a surveillance aircraft along with personnel and defensive air-to-air missiles to the United Arab Emirates. Commenting on the defection of some of the Iran women's national football team members to Australia during the 2026 Asia Cup, he claimed that the players were taken "hostage" by Australia.

After the successful April 2026 U.S. rescue operation in Iran, in which the U.S. military rescued two crew members of an F-15E Strike Eagle who had been shot down over Iran by Iranian forces during the 2026 Iran war, Baghaei claimed that the rescue operation had been "a disaster" for the United States.

Publications Baghaei has authored or co-authored a number of papers. One paper is titled "The legitimacy of the US military attack on Iraq and Afghanistan", and several are about international terrorism.