Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh killed in Iran, sparking fears of wider war
The killing, which Iran and Hamas blamed on Israel and pledged to avenge, threatens to plunge the region further into chaos and raised fresh doubts about Gaza cease-fire talks. 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. 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. 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.” 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.”