Palestinian militant group Hamas' chief, Ismail Haniyeh, has been killed in Tehran. Haniyeh's death was confirmed by Iran's Revolutionary Guards and Hamas on Wednesday. The militant group released a statement mourning Haniyeh's death, saying he was killed in "a treacherous Zionist raid on his residence in Tehran."
No one has claimed responsibility for the assassination yet. The suspicion immediately fell on Israel, which vowed to kill Haniyeh and other leaders of the Palestinian armed group over the outfit's October 7 attacks, reported the Associated Press.
Haniyeh was one of the guests at Iran President Masoud Pezeshkian's swearing-in ceremony, which took place in Iran's capital Tehran on Tuesday evening. The ceremony also saw the presence of Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari. The Hamas chief was in Tehran for the ceremony.
As many as 1,200 Israelis were killed in the attack and some 250 were taken as hostages after the attack which sparked the war in Gaza that has resulted in one of the worst humanitarian crisis killing more than 39,360 Palestinians.
Who Is Ismail Haniyeh?
Haniyeh was born in 1962 in the Shati refugee camp north of Gaza City. According to the New York Times, he was born to Palestinian parents who, in 1948, had been displaced from their home in what is now Israel, in Ashkelon.
He did his schooling from schools run by the main United Nations agency for Palestinians, UNRWA. He went to the Islamic University of Gaza for higher studies, where he studied Arabic literature.
Haniyeh was arrested by the Israeli military, and he served multiple sentences in Israeli jails in the 1980s and 1990s. The Hamas leader’s ascent to power in Gaza saw support from his mentor and a founder of Hamas, Sheik Yassin.
According to the NYT report, Haniyeh served as Yassin’s personal secretary. The two were targets of an attempted Israeli assassination attempt in 2003. Yassin was killed by the Israeli military next year.
Haniyeh was named the leader of Hamas in Gaza in 2006. In the same year, he served as prime minister of a Palestinian unity government for a brief period. His government was dissolved after months of tension that included armed conflict between Palestinian factions. He left the Gaza Strip in 2019 and had lived in exile in Qatar.
In 2017, Haniyeh was named the senior leader of Hamas. He led Hamas from Qatar and Turkey in recent years. He was among the negotiators in ongoing talks between Israel and Hamas, mediated by Egypt, Qatar, and the United States, to end the war in Gaza in exchange for hostages captured in the Hamas-led attack on Israel.
In May, the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court said he would seek an arrest warrant for Haniyeh, as per the NYT report. He along with other Hamas leaders were accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity in relation to the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
In June, Hamas said that Haniyeh’s sister and her family were killed in a strike by the Israeli military on the Haniyeh family home in Gaza, an assertion the military did not confirm, as reported by The New York Times In April, during a military operation in Gaza, three of Haniyeh’s 13 sons were killed by Israeli forces.