On Wednesday, Israel assassinated Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, shortly after he attended the inauguration of the new Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian. According to the New York Times, Haniyeh was likely killed with a bomb smuggled into the state guesthouse where he was staying. The bomb was detonated remotely, possibly with help from US Big Tech. The night before, Israel assassinated Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in south Beirut, with a precision strike. The strike killed seven civilians, along with an Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
Iranian intelligence insists that Haniyeh was killed with a missile attack (as reported by AP and Al Jazeera). The leaks coming from Israel, and shared by the New York Times and Axios, seek to establish that a bomb had been “planted for months,” perhaps to portray the attack as an intelligence operation within a shadow war rather than a military aggression. (The New York Times reported that Israeli officials are secretly admitting that Israel carried out the assassination.)
Israeli officials were quick to celebrate. Retired general Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israel’s military intelligence directorate, said on Wednesday night that the attacks were “two quality operations of Israel Defense Forces [IDF] against two top terrorists, one in Beirut and one in Tehran.”
Thousands have mourned Haniyeh in Tehran, which held a funeral for him on Thursday, having declared three days of mourning. His body was flown to Qatar’s capital, Doha, where today, like many Palestinian leaders before him, he was buried in exile. Haniyeh was born a refugee in the al-Shati refugee camp near Gaza City. His parents were refugees from the Nakba, who fled from a destroyed Palestinian village near what became the city of Ashkelon in Israel. Israel had already targeted and killed over sixty members of Haniyeh’s family in Gaza, including three of his sons, at least four of his grandchildren, and his…
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Auteur: Seraj Assi
