Hamas Politburo leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed early Wednesday in Tehran in an attack attributed to Israel that threatens to plunge the region into a new spiral of violence, with Hamas and Iran squabbling revenge.
Haniyeh, 62, had travelled to Iran to attend the inauguration of new President Masoud Pezeshkian and was asleep when a rocket hit the apartment where he was staying in a northern district of the Iranian capital. A Hamas source said Haniyeh suffered a “direct hit”.
Israel did not claim responsibility for the attack, unlike what it did hours earlier when it killed a top Hezbollah commander in Beirut, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Wednesday that the next few days would be “difficult” and assured that the country was “…prepared for any scenario,” promising a “tough response” to any attack.
The missile that killed Haniyeh was reportedly fired from an Israeli aircraft outside Iranian airspace, a shameful breach of security for the Tehran regime, which on Wednesday vowed to “defend its territorial integrity, dignity, honor and pride.” “We will make the terrorists regret their cowardly act,” President Pezeshkian assured.
Hamas has also vowed to avenge its leader’s death. “We don’t want a regional war, but this crime must be punished,” said the movement’s deputy leader, Khalil al-Haya.
Ismail Haniyeh has been Hamas’ top face abroad since 2017 and was one of the negotiators for the Gaza ceasefire. “How can negotiations succeed if one side kills the other side’s negotiator?” Qatar, which acted as a mediator, asked on Wednesday.
After the October 7 attack, Israel vowed to destroy Hamas and eliminate all its leaders. In January, Haniyeh’s right-hand man, Saleh al-Arouri, was killed in an Israeli attack in Beirut. Two months later, it was the turn of Marwan Issa, the deputy head of the group’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, whose commander, Mohammed Deif, was targeted in the Gaza Strip in July and it is unclear whether he was dead or alive. Three of Haniyeh’s children and four grandchildren were also killed in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza in April. “They died as martyrs,” Hamas’s political leader said at the time, ensuring that the deaths of their family members would not change their political positions.
Profile
Moderate terrorist
Popular in Gaza, where he was born and graduated with a degree in Arabic literature, Ismail Haniyeh was considered a moderate pragmatist, an obvious paradox given that he was the political leader of a terrorist group like Hamas. The luxurious life he led in Qatar contrasted with the poverty of the Palestinians in Gaza, the territory he took over after breaking with Mahmoud Abbas, now the kingmaker in the West Bank, following the split between Yasser Arafat’s Fatah and Hamas.
A member of Hamas since its founding, Haniyeh became close to the movement’s historic leader, Ahmad Yassin, for whom he was his right-hand man. Within the Sunni group, she maintained a “coalition of interests” with Iran’s Shiites, which guaranteed Hamas’s financial well-being. When Hamas militias invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1,400 people and taking 250 hostages, Haniyeh put his stamp on the death certificate that has now materialized.