Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Iran on Wednesday, the Palestinian militant group Hamas and Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards said in separate statements.
Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, head of Yemen’s Houthi Supreme Revolutionary Committee said: “Targeting Ismail Haniyeh is a heinous terrorist crime and a flagrant violation of laws and ideal values.”
Sami Abu Zuhri, senior Hamas official, said: “This assassination by the Israeli occupation of Brother Haniyeh
is a grave escalation that aims to break the will of Hamas and the will of our people and achieve fake goals.”
“We confirm that this escalation will fail to achieve its objectives. Hamas is a concept and an institution and not persons. Hamas will continue on this path regardless of the sacrifices and we are confident of victory.”
Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard said Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran where he had been attending the inauguration of the country’s new president.
State TV reported on his death early Wednesday. Haniyeh was in Tehran to attend Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian’s swear-in ceremony on Tuesday.
Haniyeh was killed along with one of his bodyguards.
“The residence of Ismail Haniyeh, head of the political office of Hamas Islamic Resistance, was hit in Tehran, and as a result of this incident, him and one of his bodyguards were martyred,” said a statement by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Sepah news website. The Guard said the attack was under investigation.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the assassination but suspicion immediately fell on Israel, which has vowed to kill Haniyeh and other leaders of Hamas over the group’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people and saw some 250 others taken hostage.
Analysts on Iranian state television immediately began blaming Israel for the attack. Israel itself did not immediately comment but it often doesn’t when it comes to assassination carried out by their Mossad intelligence agency.
Israel is suspected of running a years-long assassination campaign targeting Iranian nuclear scientists and others associated with its atomic program.
In 2020, a top Iranian military nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was killed by a remote-controlled machine gun while traveling in a car outside Tehran.
The apparent assassination comes at a precarious time, as the Biden administration has tried to push Hamas and Israel to agree to at least a temporary cease-fire and hostage-release deal.
CIA Director Bill Burns was in Rome on Sunday to meet with senior Israel, Qatari and Egyptian officials in the latest round of talks.
Separately, Brett McGurk, the White House Coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, is in the region for talks with US partners.
In Israel’s war against Hamas since the October attack, more than 39,360 Palestinians have been killed and more than 90,900 wounded, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, whose count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.
Considered a pragmatist, Haniyeh lived in exile and splits his time between Turkey and Qatar.
He had travelled on diplomatic missions to Iran and Turkey during the war, meeting both the Turkish and Iranian presidents.
Haniyeh was said to maintain good relations with the heads of the various Palestinian factions, including rivals to Hamas.
He joined Hamas in 1987 when the militant group was founded amid the outbreak of the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against Israeli occupation, which lasted until 1993.
Born in al-Shati, a Gaza refugee camp in 1962, Ismail Haniyeh was elected head of the Hamas political bureau in 2017 to succeed Khaled Meshaal, but was already a well-known figure having become Palestinian prime minister in 2006 following an upset victory by Hamas in that year’s parliamentary election.
But the fragile power-sharing arrangement with the Fatah movement of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas soon ruptured and Hamas took full control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 after violently ousting the president’s loyalists.
Considered a pragmatist, Haniyeh lived in exile and split his time between Turkey and Qatar.
In his youth, the Hamas leader, who is known for having a calm demeanor, was a member of the student branch of the Muslim Brotherhood at the Islamic University of Gaza.
He joined Hamas in 1987 when the militant group was founded amid the outbreak of the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against Israeli occupation, which lasted until 1993.
During that time Haniyeh was imprisoned by Israel several times and then expelled to south Lebanon for six months.
Sons killed in airstrike
Three of Haniyeh’s sons – Hazem, Amir and Mohammad – were killed on April 10 when an Israeli air strike struck the car they were driving, Hamas said. Haniyeh also lost four of his grandchildren, three girls and a boy, in the attack, Hamas said.
Haniyeh had denied Israeli assertions that his sons were fighters for the group, and said “the interests of the Palestinian people are placed ahead of everything” when asked if their killing would impact truce talks.
For all the tough language in public, Arab diplomats and officials had viewed him as relatively pragmatic compared with more hardline voices inside Gaza, where the military wing of Hamas planned the Oct. 7 attack.
While telling Israel’s military they would find themselves “drowning in the sands of Gaza”, he and his predecessor as Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, had shuttled around the region for talks over a Qatari-brokered ceasefire deal with Israel that would include exchanging hostages for Palestinians in Israeli jails as well as more aid for Gaza.
Israel regards the entire Hamas leadership as terrorists, and has accused Haniyeh, Meshaal and others of continuing to “pull the strings of the Hamas terror organization”.
But how much Haniyeh knew about the Oct. 7 assault beforehand is not clear. The plan, drawn up by the Hamas military council in Gaza, was such a closely guarded secret that some Hamas officials seemed shocked by its timing and scale.
Yet Haniyeh, a Sunni Muslim, had a major hand building up Hamas’ fighting capacity, partly by nurturing ties with Shia Muslim Iran, which makes no secret of its support for the group.
During the decade in which Haniyeh was Hamas’ top leader in Gaza, Israel accused his leadership team of helping to divert humanitarian aid to the group’s military wing. Hamas denied it.
Written with agency reports.