Hamas Leader Haniyeh Killed in Tehran

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed by an airstrike in the Iranian capital, Iran and the militant group said, blaming Israel for a shock assassination that risked escalating the conflict even as the U.S. and other nations were scrambling to prevent an all-out regional war.

There was no immediate comment from Israel, which has vowed to kill Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders over the group’s Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel. The strike came just after Haniyeh had attended the inauguration of Iran’s new president in Tehran, Iran said.

The dramatic predawn killing of Hamas’s top political leader threatened to reverberate on multiple fronts. The blow of striking Haniyeh in Tehran could trigger direct retaliation against Israel by Iran.

An influential Iranian parliamentary committee on national security and foreign policy was to hold an emergency meeting on the strike.

The strike killed Haniyeh in a residence he uses in Tehran, Hamas said in a statement, after he attended the swearing-in of Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, along with other Hamas officials and officials from Hezbollah and allied groups.

It quoted a past speech by Haniyeh in which he said the Palestinian cause has “costs” and “we are ready for these costs: martyrdom for the sake of Palestine, and for the sake of God Almighty, and for the sake of the dignity of this nation.”

Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for Hamas, said Haniyeh’s killing won’t impact the group, saying Israel was “spreading chaos and evil” in the region.

Haniyeh left the Gaza Strip in 2019 and had lived in exile in Qatar. The top Hamas leader in Gaza is Yehya Sinwar, who masterminded the Oct. 7 attack.

Haniyeh was born in the al-Shati refugee camp in the then Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip in 1963, to parents who were expelled or fled from Ashkelon during the 1948 Palestine war.

He was appointed to head a Hamas office in 1997, and subsequently rose in the ranks of the organization.