Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in the Iranian capital Tehran early on Wednesday morning, an attack that drew threats of revenge on Israel and fueled further concern that the conflict in Gaza was turning into a wider Middle East war.
The Palestinian Islamist militant group and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards confirmed Haniyeh’s death. The Guards said it took place hours after he attended a swearing-in ceremony for Iran’s new president.
Although the attack was widely assumed to have been carried out by Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government made no claim of responsibility and said it would make no comment on the killing.
Haniyeh, normally based in Qatar, had been the face of Hamas’s international diplomacy as the war set off by the Hamas-led attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 has raged in Gaza. He had been taking part in internationally-brokered indirect talks on reaching a ceasefire in the Palestinian enclave.
The assassination occurred less than 24 hours after Israel claimed to have killed Hezbollah’s most senior military commander in the Lebanese capital Beirut in retaliation for a deadly rocket strike in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Two Lebanese security sources confirmed later on Wednesday that the body of Hezbollah operations chief Fuad Shukr had been found in rubble left by an airstrike in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
