JERUSALEM — Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed early Wednesday in central Tehran, an apparent assassination that Iran and Hamas blamed on Israel and pledged to avenge. The killing, following a strike in Lebanon that Israel said killed a senior Hezbollah military commander, threatened to plunge the unstable region further into chaos and raised fresh doubts about Gaza cease-fire talks underway in Rome.
Israeli officials declined to comment on the death of Haniyeh, Hamas’s political chief in exile who was visiting Tehran for the inauguration of the newly elected Iranian president. Details of the killing remained unclear.
The killing came hours after an Israeli airstrike in Beirut targeted a senior leader of Hezbollah, another Iranian-backed militant group locked in combat with Israel. The Israel Defense Forces said Fuad Shukr was killed in the Tuesday evening attack, blaming him for the weekend rocket attack in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights that killed 12. Hezbollah has acknowledged his presence in the demolished building but said recovery efforts were continuing.
The deadly events marked the end of two key leaders of Tehran’s proxy militant groups in the region. Reports in Arabic media said that a third, Ziad al-Nakhaleh, the secretary general of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, was in the building where Haniyeh was killed.
Israel struck Lebanon and Iran in order “to set the region on fire,” senior Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya said Wednesday at a news conference in Tehran, adding that Hamas and its allies do not want a “regional war.”
But Haniyeh’s killing, he said, “sent a clear message: that our only option with this enemy is blood and resistance.”
Security analysts said the events would push the region closer to a regionwide conflict, with Iran compelled to respond to an attack in the heart of its capital. The events come just months after Iran and Israel exchanged missile and rocket attacks in a confrontation that experts warned was flirting with all-out war.
Israeli experts said Israel hoped the risk of escalation would be outweighed by a demonstration of military and intelligence prowess that allowed it to reach deep into Tehran.
“I don’t think it will change the balance of power or the face of the war, but it sends a strong signal to Iran and the axis [of proxy militant groups],” said Yoel Guzansky, a former official on Israel’s National Security Council who is now a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. “It shows them they cannot be safe anywhere, even in Tehran.”
“I think this is Israel getting some of its reputation for deterrence back,” he said.
The turmoil also casts more doubt on the latest Gaza cease-fire and hostage-release talks in Rome, which U.S. officials had described as the most promising in months. Haniyeh had an important role in negotiations and was a key decision-maker along with Yehiya Sinwar, Hamas’s military leader in Gaza, according to a diplomat briefed on the talks.
Haniyeh “was someone who saw the value of a deal and was instrumental to getting certain breakthroughs in the talks,” said the diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment on the negotiations. “At this stage, it’s unclear what the effect will be on cease-fire talks.”
Any interruption would be a blow to civilians in Gaza and the families of Israeli hostages still held in captivity there. But it may be welcome to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been accused of seeking to slow or derail the talks by introducing late demands. The prime minister returned Sunday from a U.S. trip in which he was pressed at nearly every event to reach a deal with Hamas.
The Israeli military, without commenting on the Tehran attack, said it was not implementing precautionary measures across the country Wednesday, telling citizens there were “no changes in the Home Front Command defensive guidelines.” Netanyahu scheduled a midday meeting with commanders at the country’s military headquarters in Tel Aviv.
At a military exercise in northern Israel, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the IDF chief of staff, addressed Tuesday’s attack in Beirut and boasted of his country’s ability to reach targets in other countries. “The IDF knows how to operate and reach a certain window in a neighborhood in Beirut; it knows as well how to target a certain point underground,” he said.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant suggested that Israel would continue to seek a negotiated deal to release hostages still held by Hamas.
“Especially during these times, the state of Israel is working to achieve a framework for the release of hostages,” Gallant said in a call Wednesday with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, according to a spokesperson.
Haniyeh’s killing was met with immediate condemnation and outrage across the Arab and Muslim world, with Iran threatening to retaliate.
A spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry said the killing would “strengthen the deep and unbreakable bond between the Islamic Republic of Iran and dear Palestine and the resistance.”
The head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, called it a “cowardly act and dangerous development.”
Qatar, which has hosted Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders at Washington’s request for years, also said in a statement that the killing was a “dangerous escalation, and a flagrant violation of international and humanitarian law.”
“Political assassinations & continued targeting of civilians in Gaza while talks continue leads us to ask, how can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?” Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, the country’s prime minister and foreign minister, said in a statement on social media. “Peace needs serious partners.”
Egypt’s Foreign Ministry, which has also played a key role in mediation with Hamas, condemned “the dangerous Israeli policy of escalation,” which it said undermines efforts to end the fighting and human suffering in Gaza, according to local media.
Turkey’s Foreign Ministry said Haniyeh’s death “once again demonstrates that Israel’s Netanyahu government has no intention of achieving peace,” according to Turkish state media.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the Biden administration was not warned of the attack against Haniyeh ahead of time, nor did it have any part in it.
“This is something we were not aware of or involved in,” Blinken told Channel News Asia in an interview in Singapore. “I’ve learned over many years never to speculate on the impact that an event has had on something else. So I can’t tell you what this means” for the region or the cease-fire discussions, he said.
“The best way to bring the temperature down everywhere is through the cease-fire in Gaza,” he added. “That’s why the focus on the cease-fire needs to remain for us.”
The Chinese and Russian governments also voiced alarm.
“China has always advocated resolving regional disputes through negotiation and dialogue,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said at a news briefing. Beijing last week brokered a joint statement seeking to bridge long-standing rifts between 12 Palestinian factions, including Hamas and Fatah.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry called for restraint. “It is obvious that the organizers of this political assassination were aware of the dangerous consequences this action is fraught with for the entire region,” Andrei Nastasin, a ministry spokesman, told reporters.
Israel’s silence, meanwhile, was in keeping with its usual posture following high-profile strikes and assassinations around the region, a “strategic ambiguity” that allows it to avoid official responsibility for extraterritorial operations while benefiting from the deterrent effect. After the missile strike in Iranian territory in the spring — following a barrage of rockets and drones fired from Iran toward Israel — official channels were quiet.
Within hours Wednesday, analysts had moved beyond the question of Israel’s role and on to what purpose the killing served.
In the case of Shukr, which Israel has taken responsibility for, the Israeli military eliminated the Hezbollah leader it considered the group’s operational mastermind.
The IDF said it was specifically targeting the official responsible for the rocket attack that killed 12, all children and teenagers, on a village soccer field in the occupied Golan Heights. But beyond that, Shukr was a longtime lieutenant to Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah and seen by the IDF as the group’s “senior military commander.”
Haniyeh’s killing may serve a more symbolic goal, Guzansky said.
Haniyeh was Hamas’s longtime political leader, who lived mostly in the Qatari capital Doha. But his role at the top of the group’s hierarchy has been in question since Sinwar, the group’s military leader in Gaza, launched the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and had been seen to manage the war along with negotiations for a cease-fire and hostage release ever since.
“Sinwar might be pretty happy right now. The two were rivals inside of Hamas,” Guzansky said.
Mick Mulroy, a former CIA and Marine Corps official and top Pentagon aide for the Middle East during the Trump administration, said Haniyeh’s killing represented an “absolute embarrassment” for Iran.
“Haniyeh was their guest,” he said. “This was a complete failure of their security.” He said Israel “obviously had exquisite intelligence in order to carry out this precise assassination strike.”
Iran, Hamas and other Iranian-linked groups promised to retaliate.
“The criminal and terrorist Zionist regime martyred our beloved guest inside our house and made us mournful, but it paved the way for a harsh punishment to be imposed on it,” Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in a statement Wednesday, according to state-run media.
In Tehran’s Palestine Square, a giant banner draped from a building showed Haniyeh’s photo below a message written in Hebrew: “Wait for harsh punishment.”
Suhail al-Hindi, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, promised revenge for Haniyeh, whose funeral is set to take place in Doha on Friday. The killing was a “significant blow to the Palestinian cause,” he said, though he added, “Hamas is an institutional movement that remains unharmed by the martyrdom of its leader.”
While the prospects for further escalation were high, economic constraints may dampen Iran’s willingness to risk a major confrontation, according to Meir Javedanfar, an Iran expert at Israel’s Reichman University. Iran’s government holds only three days’ worth of public salaries in local currency, he said.
“A war against Israel, even a low-intensity one, could have unbearable costs for Iran’s anemic economy,” Javedanfar said.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels, meanwhile, whom Israel targeted in an air attack this month, said they would forge ahead with support for Palestinians and “continue the path of resistance until victory.”
Susannah George in Dubai, Missy Ryan and Miriam Berger in Jerusalem, Sarah Dadouch in Beirut, Hazem Balousha and Heba Farouk Mahfouz in Cairo and Hajar Harb in London contributed to this report.
