Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh has been assassinated alongside one of his bodyguards, officials in Iran say.
It comes just hours after he attended the inauguration of Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, and met with the nation’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei.
Haniyeh was killed in an airstrike at a residence in the capital, Tehran, Hamas said in a statement early on Wednesday.
No group has claimed responsibility, but Hamas blames Israel after a previous vow to kill Haniyeh following the October 7 terror attacks, which left 1,200 people dead. A further 250 were taken hostage after terrorists wielding machine guns crossed into Israel.
Hamas said in a statement that Haniyeh was killed in an “airstrike on his residence in Tehran after he participated in the inauguration of Iran’s new president.”
Israel does not often comment on assassinations carried out by its Mossad intelligence agency.
Nader Hashemi, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Georgetown University, warned the killing of Haniyeh has brought the Middle East closer to an all-out war than any time before.
He told the BBC: “This is a major development. I think it also impacts events in Lebanon because just a few hours earlier Israel tried to assassinate a senior Hezbollah leader in southern Beirut and the working assumption was that Iran and Hezbollah were not interested in escalation.”
But he said the assassination has upended those calculations, adding. “Now Iran has every incentive to try and escalate this conflict.”
In retaliation for the October 7 attacks, Benjamin Netanyahu’s military has killed more than 39,360 Palestinians and wounded more than 90,900, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, whose count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.
Senior Hamas official Moussa Abu Marzouk has warned Haniyeh’s assassination will not go unanswered. In April, three of his sons were killed in an airstrike in the Gaza Strip.
Haniyeh accused Israel of acting in “the spirit of revenge and murder” and said his sons “were martyred on the road to liberating Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.”
He said the killings would not pressure Hamas into softening its positions amid ongoing cease-fire negotiations with Israel, brokered by international mediators.
Haniyeh left Gaza in 2019 and lived in exile in Qatar. The top Hamas leader in Gaza is Yehya Sinwar, who masterminded the October 7 attack on Israel that sparked the war.
Israel’s war against Hamas has devastated the Gaza Strip and pushed the tiny Palestinian territory into a humanitarian crisis, leaving more than one million people on the brink of starvation.
