Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran where he had been attending the inauguration of the country’s new president, Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard said.
In a statement, Hamas mourned the death of Haniyeh, who it said was killed in “a treacherous Zionist raid on his residence in Tehran”.
State TV reported on his death early Wednesday. Ismail was in Tehran to attend Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian’s swear-in ceremony on Tuesday.
Haniyeh was killed along with one of his bodyguards.
“The residence of Ismail Haniyeh, head of the political office of Hamas Islamic Resistance, was hit in Tehran, and as a result of this incident, him and one of his bodyguards were martyred,” said a statement by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Sepah news website. The Guard said the attack was under investigation.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the assassination but suspicion immediately fell on Israel, which 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.
Analysts on Iranian state television immediately began blaming Israel for the attack. Israel itself did not immediately comment but it often doesn’t when it comes to assassination carried out by their Mossad intelligence agency.
Israel is suspected of running a years-long assassination campaign targeting Iranian nuclear scientists and others associated with its atomic program.
In 2020, a top Iranian military nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was killed by a remote-controlled machine gun while traveling in a car outside Tehran.
The apparent assassination comes at a precarious time, as the Biden administration has tried to push Hamas and Israel to agree to at least a temporary cease-fire and hostage-release deal.
CIA Director Bill Burns was in Rome on Sunday to meet with senior Israel, Qatari and Egyptian officials in the latest round of talks.
Separately, Brett McGurk, the White House Coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, is in the region for talks with US partners.
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, whose count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.
Considered a pragmatist, Haniyeh lived in exile and splits his time between Turkey and Qatar.
He had travelled on diplomatic missions to Iran and Turkey during the war, meeting both the Turkish and Iranian presidents.
Haniyeh was said to maintain good relations with the heads of the various Palestinian factions, including rivals to Hamas.
He joined Hamas in 1987 when the militant group was founded amid the outbreak of the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against Israeli occupation, which lasted until 1993.
With agencies
