Ismail Haniyeh, the political chief of Hamas, was assassinated in Tehran, Hamas and Iran’s foreign ministry announced Wednesday morning, marking a significant escalation in the Middle East conflict. Iran has vowed a “harsh and painful response” in retaliation.
Haniyeh’s murder in Iran came only hours after Israeli forces said they had killed a senior Hezbollah commander in a strike on Beirut — in retaliation for an attack on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on Saturday, which struck a football pitch, killing 12 children and youths from the Druze community.
In a statement, Hamas said its leader was killed in “a treacherous Zionist raid on his residence in Tehran,” and vowed revenge. Haniyeh, who was one of Hamas’ top leaders for nearly two decades, was in Iran for the inauguration of the country’s new president. Iranian state media said Haniyeh died when a rocket struck a facility for veterans in northern Tehran.
Israel has been accused of carrying out several assassinations inside Iran in league with anti-regime resistance fighters over the past years, including a series of attacks on top nuclear scientists. It has not commented on the death of Haniyeh.
If a pinpoint Israeli strike is confirmed, his murder will be a massive and embarrassing security lapse for the Iranians as Haniyeh had been a central part of the inauguration ceremony, hugging and kissing Iran’s new President Masoud Pezeshkian.
The immediate reaction from Tehran came from foreign ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani, who said the “pure blood” of Haniyeh “will never be wasted” and vowed the “unbreakable bond” between Iran and the Palestinians would only be strengthened.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Wednesday morning that Iran considers it its “duty to take revenge” for the assassination. “With this action, the criminal and terrorist Zionist regime prepared the ground for a harsh punishment for itself,” he said.
The longer-term question will be what Tehran does in practical terms, given it was willing to launch a massive missile barrage against Israel in April. The strike on Hezbollah — a group fully supported by Tehran — will also raise the prospect of an Iranian response.
Since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, in which the militant group killed some 1,200 Israelis and took around 250 others hostage, Israel’s leaders have vowed revenge on Hamas officials. In the 10 months since, Israel’s airstrikes and ground operations have killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians, the Gazan authorities say.
Israel has a long track record of killing Hamas’ leadership. In 2004, Israel carried out an airstrike in Gaza killing Hamas’ then-leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi. The same year, it assassinated one of the militant group’s founders, Ahmed Yassin, in Gaza City.
In recent months, Haniyeh led efforts to negotiate a cease-fire from exile in Qatar.
The top Hezbollah commander killed over the same night in Beirut was named as Fuad Shukr. The U.S. had been offering a reward of up to $5 million for information on his whereabouts — linking him to a 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine Corps barracks that killed 241 U.S. military personnel.
Washington and European capitals fear these tensions could quickly snowball into a regional conflict. Leaders and officials in France, Germany, Italy and the U.K. have been reaching out to counterparts in Lebanon, Israel and Iran to forestall a wider regional war. The stakes are particularly high for Paris and Rome, which have hundreds of troops stationed in the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).
Even NATO heavyweight Turkey has threatened to intervene in the conflict to support the Palestinians. Turkey’s foreign ministry labeled Haniyeh‘s killing a “heinous attack.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan himself weighed in a statement published on X, strongly condemning the “treacherous assassination,” holding Israel responsible for the attack “aimed at disrupting the Palestinian cause,” and adding that “Zionist barbarism will not be able to achieve its goals.”
“With the stronger stance of the Islamic world and the alliance of humanity, I hope that the terror inflicted by Israel in our region, especially the oppression and genocide in Gaza, will definitely come to an end,” Erdoğan wrote.
Moscow, which is seen as friendly to Hamas, condemned what it called the “completely unacceptable political assassination” of Haniyeh, who met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow in September 2022.
“We believe that such actions are directed against attempts to restore peace in the region and could significantly destabilize an already tense situation,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
The Biden administration was not warned of the attack against Haniyeh ahead of time, nor did it have any part in it, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday. “This is something we were not aware of or involved in,” Blinken told broadcaster Channel News Asia from Singapore.
Germany’s foreign office called on “all actors to exercise maximum restraint,” adding that “the logic of mutual retaliatory strikes is a mistake.”
“The chance of a hostage agreement and a ceasefire in Gaza must not be squandered now,” the spokesperson said.
This story is being updated.