Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ top political leader, assassinated in Iran

Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ top political leader since 2017, was assassinated early Wednesday morning in an attack on his residence in Iran’s capital Tehran, the Palestinian fundamentalist group has confirmed in a statement. The movement lamented the loss of Haniyeh in what it termed a “treacherous Zionist raid” and praised their “brother, leader and martyr” who, Hamas said, had participated Tuesday in the inauguration ceremony for the new Iranian president, Masud Pezeshkian, with whom he also held a bilateral meeting. Haniyeh’s death is a serious blow for Hamas, which will now have to announce a new political leader, and threatens to escalate the conflict in the region.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the elite corps and parallel army of the regime, also confirmed the death of the Hamas leader and added that one of his bodyguards had been killed along with Haniyeh. There has been, however, no official reaction from Israel, which a few hours earlier acknowledged having assassinated Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s number two, in a bombing raid over southern Beirut.

International condemnations from nations such as Qatar, Turkey, Russia and China have been joined by promises of revenge from Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hamas has also stated that it will respond. The organization led by Haniyeh considered the action a “grave escalation that will fail to achieve its objectives,” according to one of its spokesmen, Sami Abu Zuhri, as quoted by Reuters. Abu Zuhri added, within the group’s rhetoric, that they maintain the open war to “liberate Jerusalem” from Israeli occupation and are willing to pay the necessary price. Another senior Hamas official, Moussa Abu Marzuk, speaking to the Al-Aqsa television channel, a Hamas media outlet, called the operation a “cowardly act that will not go unpunished,” reported Al Jazeera.

The president of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, described the strike as “cowardly” and “dangerous,” according to a statement by the official Palestinian news agency Wafa. A one-day strike has been called in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The ongoing war in Gaza broke out when hundreds of armed Palestinians led by Hamas killed some 1,200 people on Israeli territory last October 7, leading the Israel Defense Forces to set in motion its war machine in a conflict that has resulted in the deaths of almost 40,000 people in the Strip. During its offensive, the Israeli Security Forces have tried to hunt down or annihilate Hamas leaders in the Palestinian enclave but have not succeeded, although they do claim to have wiped out half of the leadership of its armed wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades.

The Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, maintains that one of the essential objectives of the war — in addition to bringing back the hostages — is to put an end to Hamas on a political and military level. Within the army, however, there are doubts that this overly ambitious objective can be achieved. On July 13, in a bombing in southern Gaza that killed at least 90 people, the target was Mohamed Deif, head of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades in the Palestinian enclave, whose death was not confirmed. Along with Yahya Sinwar, a political leader in Gaza, he is considered the main instigator of the October 7 massacre and of the armed resistance inside the Strip.

The strike against Haniyeh is an important turn of events in the Jewish State’s efforts to eliminate the Hamas leadership, with which Israel at the same time is trying to reach a ceasefire agreement with the help of international negotiators. The question that remains at this point is whether these contacts will be maintained, and whether Israel’s efforts to bring back the captives in Gaza will be directly affected.

The Israeli authorities systematically point to Iran as primarily responsible for the instability in the region. The Tehran regime is the main economic, military, and strategic supporter not only of the Lebanese militia Hezbollah and the Palestinians of Hamas, but also of the Houthis in Yemen, who are also in confrontation with the Jewish state. As such, with the assassination of Haniyeh, Israel is sending the double message of acting against Hamas and, furthermore, doing so on Iranian territory.

The strike carried out in Tehran has been met with the silence of official Israeli sources, who rarely comment on their operations abroad. However, on Tuesday evening, the army confirmed the death of Fuad Shukr, considered Hezbollah’s number two and a veteran member of the group since it was founded four decades ago, who Israel blames as being behind the deaths last Saturday of 12 children in a missile strike on the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights. In addition, the U.S. State Department accused him of the attack on a barracks in which 241 Americans were killed in Lebanon in 1983. Israel considers him to be the right-hand man of Hasan Nasrallah, head of the Lebanese Shiite militia.

Until Haniyeh’s assassination, the biggest blow to the leadership of the Palestinian fundamentalist group during the current conflict took place on April 10 when a bombing raid on Gaza killed three of his children and four of his grandchildren. The attack took place in the Shati refugee camp. “If they think that targeting my children at the peak of these talks before the movement’s response is submitted will cause Hamas to change its positions, they are delusional,” he told Qatar’s Al Jazeera at the time.

Subsequently, on June 21, a dozen of Haniyeh’s relatives were killed in another Israeli attack on Gaza. Israel, although it has never officially acknowledged its responsibility, assassinated Saleh al-Arouri, Hamas’s deputy leader, in a drone attack on January 2 in Beirut in what is considered the first attack by the Jewish state against the Lebanese capital since 2006, when the Hezbollah militia and Israeli troops clashed in their last major conflict.

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