Senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh killed in Iran, group says

The group said senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Iran.

In a statement released on Wednesday, Hamas said Haniyeh was killed in an Israeli strike on his residence in Tehran.

Several other senior Hamas figures, including Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, have described Haniyeh’s death as an “assassination” and vowed revenge.

The cause of the “incident” is unclear but is “under investigation,” the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps said, AFP news agency reported.

According to the group, Haniyeh was killed a day after attending the inauguration of Iran’s new President Masoud Pezeshkian, who was sworn in on Tuesday.

Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls Gaza, said Haniyeh was “killed in a treacherous raid by the Israeli army”.

The group’s politburo member, Musa Abu Marzuk, said it was a “cowardly act” and “will not be responded to”; while another senior Hamas official, Sami Abu Zuhri, said the group would “continue on its path”.

“This assassination by the Israeli occupation forces of Brother Haniyeh is a serious escalation aimed at breaking the will of Hamas and the will of our people to achieve false goals,” Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters news agency.

Iran’s foreign ministry said Haniyeh’s “martyrdom” would “strengthen the deep and unbreakable ties between Tehran, Palestine and the resistance”, state media reported.

The Russian and Turkish foreign ministries also condemned the attack.

Israel has yet to respond or make a statement.

Haniyeh’s death came just an hour after Israel announced it had killed the senior military commander of Hezbollah, a Lebanon-based group that is also backed by Iran.

Israel said it killed Fuad Shukr in an air strike, in retaliation for a rocket attack on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights at the weekend.

Hezbollah has not yet confirmed that a senior commander was killed in an Israeli strike in Beirut on Tuesday, but said Shukr was in a targeted building.

“Since the incident, civil defense teams have been working steadily but slowly to lift the rubble due to the situation of the destroyed classrooms, and we are still waiting for the results,” the group said in a statement on Wednesday.

Haniyeh, 62, is widely seen as the overall leader of Hamas.

He was a prominent member of the group’s movement in the late 1980s and was detained by Israel for three years in 1989 when it suppressed the first Palestinian uprising.

Then, in 1992, he was exiled to a no-man’s land between Israel and Lebanon, along with several Hamas leaders.

Haniyeh was appointed Palestinian prime minister by President Mahmoud Abbas in 2006 after Hamas won the most seats in national elections, but he was dismissed a year later when the group drove Abbas’s Fatah party from the Gaza Strip in a week of deadly violence.

Haniyeh dismissed his dismissal as “unconstitutional”, stressing that his government “will not abandon its national responsibility towards the Palestinian people” and continue to rule in Gaza.

He was was elected head of Hamas’ political body in 2017.

In 2018, The US State Department designates Haniyeh as a terroristHe has lived in Qatar for many years.