Who was Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas leader killed in Iran?

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Tehran, suspected Israeli involvement, complex political history, and regional diplomatic ties.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran, Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard said on early July 31. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the assassination but suspicion immediately fell on Israel, which has vowed to kill Haniyeh and other leaders of Hamas over the group’s October 7 attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people and saw some 250 others taken hostage.

As chairman of the Political Bureau of Hamas, Haniyeh, who lived in Qatar, was seen as the overall leader of the group (though it is not clear how much authority he exercised over Hamas in Gaza). Haniyeh was also involved with Hamas’s radical operations in the late 1980s and got arrested several times by the Israelis.

After he was released from jail in 1992, Israel exiled him, along with a group of other Hamas leaders, to a no-man’s land in southern Lebanon. A year later, he returned to Gaza. His quick rise within Hamas began after he was chosen to head the office of the movement’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Yassin, in 1997.

In 2006, when the Palestinian Authority held parliamentary elections in the West Bank and Gaza, Haniyeh was the Parliamentary leader of Hamas. The Islamist group clinched a surprising victory in the election and Haniyeh became the ‘Prime Minister of the State of Palestine’. But as tensions between Fatah, the party of President Mahmoud Abbas, and Hamas emerged, Mr. Abbas dissolved the Hamas government in 2007. Haniyeh did not accept his decree and continued to rule from Gaza, while Fatah ran the authority in the West Bank.

Haniyeh stepped down as the Hamas leader in Gaza in 2017, paving the way for Yahya Sinwar’s rise. In the same year, Haniyeh was appointed the chairman of Hamas’s Political Bureau, taking over from Khaled Meshal.

He was the tough-talking face of the Palestinian group’s international diplomacy as war raged back in Gaza, where three of his sons were killed in an Israeli airstrike. But despite the rhetoric, he was seen by many diplomats as a moderate compared to the more hardline members of the Iran-backed group inside Gaza.

Israel’s response to the strike has been a military campaign that has killed more than 35,000 people inside Gaza so far, according to health authorities in the territory.