Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran, Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard said early Wednesday, and Hamas blamed Israel for the attack.
Israel 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.
An Israeli military spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Israel often doesn’t when it comes to assassinations carried out by their Mossad intelligence agency.
Hamas said Haniyeh was killed “in a Zionist airstrike on his residence in Tehran after he participated in the inauguration of Iran’s new president.”
“Hamas declares to the great Palestinian people and the people of the Arab and Islamic nations and all the free people of the world, brother leader Ismail Ismail Haniyeh a martyr,” the terse statement said.
After a rocket strike on Saturday at a soccer field killed 12 children and teens, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that Hezbollah ‘will pay a heavy price for this attack, one that it has not paid so far.’
Haniyeh was in Tehran to attend Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian’s swear-in ceremony on Tuesday.
Iran gave no details on how Haniyeh was killed, and the Guard said the attack, which also left one of his bodyguard’s dead, was under investigation.
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.
On Tuesday, an Israeli airstrike targeted a senior Hezbollah commander in Beirut’s southern suburbs late on Tuesday, in what the Israeli military said was retaliation for a cross-border rocket attack three days before that killed 12 children in a Druze community in the Golan Heights.
The Israeli military said late on Tuesday that Israeli air force fighter jets killed Hezbollah’s most senior military commander and head of its strategic unit, Fuad Shukr, also known as “Sayyid Muhsan.”
Haniyeh left the Gaza Strip in 2019 and had lived in exile in Qatar. The top Hamas leader in Gaza is Yahya Sinwar, who masterminded the Oct. 7 attack.
In April, an Israeli airstrike in Gaza killed three of Haniyeh’s sons and four of his grandchildren.
