Various Iranian agencies reported that the leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated in Iran in his residence.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard announced that the leader of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, was murdered in Tehran along with one of his bodyguards.
Hamas accused Israel of killing Haniyeh, who ran Hamas’s political operations from exile in Qatar, the New York Times reported.
"The residence of Ismail Haniyeh, head of the political office of the Islamic Resistance Hamas, was attacked in Tehran and, as a result of this incident, he and one of his bodyguards were martyred," said a statement on the Hamas news page. branch of the Iranian armed forces.
"Brother, leader, the mujahideen Ismail Haniyeh, leader of the movement, died in a Zionist attack on his offices in Tehran after he participated in the inauguration of the new" Iranian president, this movement in power in Gaza stated in a statement.Casualties among enemies of Israel
The death of Ismail Haniyeh joins a series of high-ranking Hamas casualties, among which the president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, stands out, who died in a plane crash a few months ago and the news of the death comes a few hours after Israel confirmed having assassinated Hezbollah’s military chief, Fuad Shukr, “the most senior military leader” of the group and a close advisor to the organization’s leader Hasan Nasrallah.
Israel blamed Shukr, considered Hezbollah’s chief of staff, for the deaths of thousands of Israeli civilians over the years, and specifically for the 12 children who died on Saturday in a rocket attack in the Druze town of Majdal Shams. , in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Who was Ismail Haniyeh?
Haniyeh was born in the Al Shati refugee camp in the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip in 1962. He studied at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he first became involved with Hamas, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Arabic literature in 1987.
He was appointed to head a Hamas office in 1997, and grew through the organization’s ranks.
Haniyeh led the Hamas list that won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, and became the Palestinian prime minister in a government of national unity with President Mahmoud Abbas’s secular Fatah, but historic disagreements between the two groups ended with the expulsion of Fatah of the Strip and the forcible seizure of power by the Islamists in the enclave, governed de facto by them since 2007.
Haniyeh was the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip from 2006 until February 2017, when he was replaced by Yahya Sinwar, considered the mastermind of the October 7 attacks and the group’s true power, with the last word in the recent negotiations with Israel for a truce.
A few months later, on May 6, 2017, Haniyeh was elected president of the Hamas Political Bureau, replacing Khaled Mashal; when he moved from the Strip to Qatar, from where he was responsible for the leadership and representation of the Islamist group, especially in the international arena.