AP (“Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh is killed in Iran by an alleged Israeli strike, threatening escalation“):
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed by a predawn airstrike in the Iranian capital Wednesday, Iran and the militant group said, blaming Israel for a shock assassination that risks escalating the conflict even as the U.S. and other nations were scrambling to prevent an all-out regional war. Iran’s supreme leader vowed revenge against Israel.
There was no immediate comment from Israel, which has pledged to kill Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders over the group’s Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel in which the Palestinian militant 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. He said Israel had “prepared a harsh punishment for itself” by killing “a dear guest in our home.”
Bitter regional rivals, Israel and Iran risked plunging into war earlier this year when Israel hit Iran’s embassy in Damascus in April. Iran retaliated and Israel countered in an unprecedented exchange of strikes on each other’s soil, but international efforts succeeded in containing that cycle before it spun out of control.
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.
Reuters/Jerusalem Post (“Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Tehran“):
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Iran, Hamas claimed on Wednesday morning, while claiming Israel was behind the attack.
In a statement, the Islamist terror group said they mourned the death of Haniyeh, who they claimed was killed in “a treacherous Zionist raid on his residence in Tehran.”
Haniyeh, along with one of his guards, was reportedly killed at his Tehran residence, according to an IRGC statement, and Saudi Arabia’s Al-Arabiya reported that he was killed at approximately 2:00 a.m. Wednesday morning.
[…]
Haniyeh is the political leader of the Hamas terror organization. He was visiting Iran for the swearing-in of the new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.
Three of Haniyeh’s sons were killed in an airstrike in April. His sister was also eliminated last month.
The Gaza-based residence of Haniyeh, which was used as terrorist infrastructure, was hit by an IDF airstrike in November. Haniyeh usually resides in Qatar, but his property was being used as a meeting place for other members of Hamas leadership.
Such brazen attack in Iran’s capital will undoubtedly lead to escalation. The prospects for the low-level regional conflict between Israel and Iran and its proxies in Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere heating to a boil have increased significantly.
At the same time, I can’t help but be pleased when perpetrators of mass murder are taken out. And sending a signal to other terrorists that they are not safe anywhere is a nice bonus as well.
