BEIRUT (AP) — Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed by a predawn airstrike in the Iranian capital Wednesday, Iran and the terror group said. Iran’s supreme leader blamed Israel for the assassination and vowed revenge.
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 terror 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.
Haniyeh’s killing could also prompt Hamas to pull out of negotiations for a cease-fire and hostage release deal in the 10-month-old war in Gaza, which U.S. mediators had said were making progress.
And it could enflame already heightening tensions between Israel and Hezbollah — which international diplomats were trying to contain after a weekend rocket attack that killed 12 young people in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.
Tuesday evening, Israel carried out a rare strike in the Lebanese capital that it said killed a top Hezbollah commander allegedly behind the rocket strike. Hezbollah, which denied any role in the Golan strike, said Wednesday that it was still searching for the body of Fouad Shukur in the rubble of the building that was hit in a Beirut suburb, killing two women and two children, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.
There was no immediate reaction from the White House to the killing of Haniyeh.
Asked by reporters in Manila about the Tehran strike, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said he had no “additional information to provide.” But he expressed hope for a diplomatic solution on the Israeli-Lebanon border.
“I don’t think that war is inevitable,” he said. “I maintain that. I think there’s always room and opportunity for diplomacy, and I’d like to see parties pursue those opportunities.”
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 October 7 attack.
— Associated Press writers Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran, David Rising in Bangkok, and Jon Gambrell in Ubud, Indonesia, contributed to this report.
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