Hamas Leader Killed in Iran

Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political and diplomatic leader, was killed in his residence in Tehran Wednesday morning, according to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. Haniyeh’s bodyguard was also claimed to have been killed.

The IRGC statement read:

With condolences to the heroic nation of Palestine and the Islamic nation and the combatants of the Resistance Front and the noble nation of Iran, this morning [Wednesday] the residence of Mr. Dr. Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the political office of the Islamic Resistance of Hamas, was hit in Tehran, and following this incident, he and one of his bodyguards were martyred.

Haniyeh was elected as the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority in 2006, serving until his 2007 dismissal by the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Haniyeh had lived in Qatar since 2017, moving there after succeeding Khaled Mashal as Hamas’s political leader. Haniyeh was in Tehran for the swearing in of Iran’s new president Masoud Pezeshkian.

Alongside Yahya Sinwar, the military leader of Hamas, Haniyeh was one the two most powerful men in the Sunni militant organization. The International Criminal Court had issued an arrest warrant for him in late May. Hamas has responded to Haniyeh’s assassination by releasing its own statement, which claimed that Haniyeh was killed in “a treacherous Zionist raid on his residence in Tehran.”