BEIRUT,
Ismail was on Israel’s hit-list since Oct 7 attack
- Iran and Hamas blame Israel for killing, Israel has not commented
- He had attended swearing-in of Iran’s new President on Tuesday
ISMAIL Haniyeh, Hamas’
supreme leader in exile who
landed on Israel’s hit-list after
the militant group staged its
surprise October 7 attacks, was
killed in an airstrike in the
Iranian capital early
Wednesday. He was 62.
Iran and the militant blamed
Israel for a shock assassination
that risks escalating the conflict even as the US and other
nations were scrambling to prevent an all-out regional war.
Hamas said Haniyeh was
killed at his residence in Tehran
in an Israeli airstrike after he
attended the swearing-in ceremony of Iran’s new President.
Israel has not commented on
the accusation.
Hours after theOctober 7 attacks, Haniyeh appeared in a video releasedbyHamasleading prayers with other top Hamas officials. They thanked God for the success of the attack, which blasted through Israel’s vaunted defences and resulted in the deadliest assault in Israel’s history.
Haniyeh’s death makes him
the latest Hamas official to be
killed by Israel since the
Hamas-led October 7 attacks,
when militants killed 1,200
people and took about 250
hostages. The devastating
Israel-Hamas war the attacks
set off has become the deadliest and longest in the ArabIsraeli conflict. More than
39,000 Palestinians have been
killed, according to health officials in Gaza.
While Hamas’ Gaza leader
Yahya Sinwar is believed to
have been the mastermind of
the attacks, Haniyeh, seen as a
more moderate force in Hamas,
lauded them as a humiliating
blow to Israel’s aura of invincibility.
“The Al-Aqsa flood was an
earthquake that struck the
heart of the Zionist entity and
has made major changes at the
world level,” Haniyeh said in a
speech in Iran during the funeral of late Iranian President
Ebrahim Raisi in May.
“We will continue the resistance against this enemy until
we liberate our land, all our
land,” Haniyeh said