Hamas’ top political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed Wednesday in an apparent assassination at his residence in Tehran, according to the Palestinian militant group Hamas and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
Haniyeh and his bodyguard were killed after attending the swearing-in inauguration ceremony of the new Iranian president, Hamas said in a statement. The Revolutionary Guards confirmed Haniyeh’s death in a separate statement, saying he had been assassinated.
Details about the killing, and who was responsible, were still emerging. Hamas and its ally Iran immediately blamed Israel.
Israel rarely if ever directly confirms such high-profile attacks, though it has been targeting Hamas’ senior leadership as well as senior Hezbollah commanders in Lebanon in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.
Israel’s Defense Forces declined to comment.
Haniyeh’s killing took place just hours after Israel said it undertook an “intelligence-based elimination” of top Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut in retaliation for a rocket attack on a soccer field in the Israel-occupied Golan Heights on Saturday that killed 12 people, mostly children.
That incident, and the new one involving Haniyeh, has threatened to escalate regional hostilities and perhaps even prompt a wider Middle East war that could draw in foreign power involvement including from the U.S.
“Hezbollah − and now Iran − will be under immense pressure to respond forcefully to these strikes,” said Michael DiMino, a former CIA intelligence analyst and military expert at Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank. DiMino said the U.S. will likely “reflexively surge additional military assets to the region.”
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, on a trip to the Philippines, said Wednesday that the U.S. was trying to “take the temperature down.” He said he had no additional information on the reports of Haniyeh’s death.
Haniyeh, the former Gaza prime minister, was Hamas’ top leader in the Palestinian enclave since 2017 and was known for his tough-talking rhetoric as the face of the group. From his headquarters in Qatar, he was in charge of the group’s
He was considered more moderate than Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, the Gaza-based leaders of Hamas’ military wing. Sinwar and Deif are believed to be the masterminds behind the group’s Oct. 7 attacks which left 1,200 people dead. Hundreds were taken hostage.
At the time of his killing, Haniyeh was playing a leading role in negotiations to reach a ceasefire with Israel in exchange for freeing hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, where they have been for 10 months. It was not immediately clear what his death would mean for that all-but-deadlocked process.
Iran has long accused Israel of carrying out targeted assassinations on its soil, including of its top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in 2021. The two adversaries have also long fought a so-called shadow war, which spilled out into the open for the first time in April when they shattered a taboo by directly attacking each other with limited strikes.
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