Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed by a predawn airstrike in the Iranian capital on Wednesday, with Iran and the militant group blaming Israel for a shock assassination that risks escalating the conflict even as the U.S. and other nations were scrambling to prevent an all-out regional war. Iran’s supreme leader vowed revenge against Israel.
There was no immediate comment from Israel, which has pledged to kill Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders over the group’s October 7 attack on southern Israel in which the Palestinian militant group killed 1,200 people and took some 250 others hostage. The strike came just after Haniyeh had attended the inauguration of Iran’s new president in Tehran—and only hours after Israel targeted a top commander in Iran’s ally Hezbollah in the Lebanese capital Beirut.
The dramatic assassination of Hamas’s top political leader threatened to reverberate throughout the region’s intertwined conflicts. Most explosively, the strike in Tehran could push Iran and Israel into direct conflict if Iran retaliates.
“We consider his revenge as our duty,” Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a statement on his official website. He said Israel had “prepared a harsh punishment for itself” by killing “a dear guest in our home.”
Bitter regional rivals, Israel and Iran risked plunging into war earlier this year when Israel hit Iran’s embassy in Damascus in April. Iran retaliated and Israel responded in an unprecedented exchange of strikes on each other’s soil, but international diplomacy succeeded in containing that cycle before it spun out of control.
Haniyeh’s killing could also prompt Hamas to pull out of negotiations for a cease-fire in the relentless decade-old war in Gaza, which U.S. mediators had said were making progress.
The U.S. and other allied nations are heightening tensions between Israel and Hezbollah along the Lebanese border, with security forces trying to contain after a weekend rocket attack killed an Israeli soldier in the Golan Heights.
Haniyeh’s death comes at a critical juncture, threatening to unravel fragile regional stability and triggering a new wave of violence in a conflict already marked by decades of strife. As Iran vows retaliation and Israel braces for potential reprisals, the international community watches anxiously, fearing the potential fallout of this high-stakes assassination.
The Associated Press
