TEHRAN – Brazilian political cartoonist Carlos Latuff has created a work regarding the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, who was martyred during U.S.-Israeli airstrikes that targeted his office in central Tehran on Saturday.

Latuff is known cartoonist in Iran as he won second place in the 2006 Iranian International Holocaust Cartoon Competition, ILNA reported.

Iran and the U.S. had agreed to attend a fourth round of nuclear talks in Vienna next week, following their most serious discussions in Geneva on Thursday. However, the U.S. derailed diplomatic negotiations with Iran just like the previous time in June 2025, launching a bombing campaign against Iran in conjunction with Israel.

The attacks prompted a swift response from the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC), with missile and drone launches targeting Israel and several U.S. bases in the region, occurring less than two hours after the strikes.

Carlos Latuff, 57, is a Brazilian political cartoonist. His work deals with themes such as anti-Western sentiment, anti-capitalism, and opposition to U.S. military intervention in foreign countries. He is best known for his images depicting the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the Arab Spring.

He was born in the São Cristóvão neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and is of Lebanese descent. He has stated that his “Arab roots” are what drive him to advocate for Arab causes, including the Palestinian cause.

His career began in 1990, as a cartoonist for leftist publications in Brazil. After watching a 1997 documentary about the Zapatistas in Mexico, he sent a couple of cartoons to them, and received a positive response. He has stated that after this experience, he decided to start a website and engage in “artistic activism”. Graham Fowell, ex-chairman of the Cartoonists' Club of Great Britain, has compared his work to that of Banksy, the English-based graffiti artist.

Latuff has been arrested at least three times in Brazil for his cartoons about the Brazilian police, whom he has criticized for police brutality.

His works have often been self-published on Indymedia websites and private blogs. He is a weekly cartoonist for The Globe Post and some of his cartoons have been featured in magazines such as the Brazilian edition of Mad, Le Monde Diplomatique and the Mondoweiss website. 

Moreover, a few of his works were published on Arab websites and publications such as the Islamic Front for the Iraqi Resistance (JAMI) magazine, the Saudi magazine Character, and the Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar, among others. 

Additionally, Latuff also contributes to several Middle Eastern newspapers, including Alquds Alarabi, Huna Sotak and the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project – IRDP. 

In 2019 a selection of his cartoons was published in the book “Drawing Attention to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Political Cartoons by Carlos Latuff”. His work is also published on the Chinese Twitter account Valiant Panda heavily shared by Chinese state affiliated media, government officials, and embassies.

Latuff has produced numerous cartoons related to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which assumed significance for the cartoonist after a visit to the region in the late 1990s. His cartoons are highly critical of Israel.

His work has also been critical of the US military action in Iraq and in Afghanistan. He began to publish his work on the web from the earliest stages of the invasion.

Since the end of 2010, he has been engaged in producing cartoons about the Arab Spring in which he sided with the revolutionaries. His cartoons on the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 were enlarged and carried by the Egyptian demonstrators. 

After the victory of revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya his cartoons about these countries have focused on the menace of counter-revolution or Western interference. Some of his cartoons have been displayed in mass demonstrations in Arab countries.

SS/