At least 50 people have been killed at a cemetery in Iran where a ceremony was being held to mark the 2020 assassination of Iran’s top commander Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian official has told the Reuters news agency.

State media reports added there were two explosions at the site in the city of Kerman where the former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander is buried.

Hundreds of people had reportedly gathered at the site. The state-run IRNA news agency reported that another 40 people have been wounded.

An Iranian official described the explosions as “terrorist attacks”, according to state media.

It comes a day after Hamas’s deputy leader Saleh Arouri died in an explosion in Beirut.

Soleimani, once Iran’s top military general, was assassinated in a US drone strike during a visit to Iraq in 2020 to meet then-prime minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi.

The drone strike caused a major diplomatic crisis between the US and Iran, leading to retaliatory rocket strikes against US military sites in Iraq and pushing the two countries to the brink of war.

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More than a million people took to the streets for the funeral – leading to a stampede in which 56 mourners were killed.

Having served in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Cops, Soleimani went on to

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