JERUSALEM — The brazen killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, an attack Iranian and Hamas officials blamed on Israel, plunged the Middle East into greater turmoil on Wednesday, unleashing fears of a wider regional conflict and upending months-long efforts to reach a cease-fire deal in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli officials declined to comment on the operation, even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his government had dealt “crushing blows” to Hezbollah and Hamas in recent days, including a strike that killed Hezbollah’s chief military officer in a Beirut suburb on Tuesday. Both groups are backed by Iran.
In a televised address, Netanyahu, facing intense global pressure to conclude his war against Hamas in Gaza, said that Israel would not tolerate aggression by any party. “Israel will exact a very heavy price for aggression against us from whatever quarter,” he said.
The attack, a stunning security and intelligence failure, targeted Haniyeh as he visited Tehran for the inauguration of its new president. Senior Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya said Wednesday that the longtime leader, who was born in Gaza, was hit “directly” by a missile in the state guesthouse where he was staying.
Hayya, speaking at a news conference in the Iranian capital, accused Israel of striking Lebanon and Iran in order “to set the region on fire.” Hamas and its allies don’t want a regional war, he said, but the death of Haniyeh, who played a key role in negotiations to end the Gaza conflict, had sent a clear message — “that our only option with this enemy is blood and resistance.”
Haniyeh’s assassination came just hours after an Israeli airstrike near Beirut targeted Fuad Shukr, a senior leader of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group also locked in a decades-long conflict with Israel. Hezbollah confirmed his death on Wednesday. The Israel Defense Forces blamed Shukr for a rocket strike in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights over the weekend that killed 12 teenagers and children.
The cascading events, which came several months after Israel and Iran attacked each other with drones and missiles, threatened to push the region to the brink of an all-out conflict, with the Iranian leadership under pressure to respond. Still, the two sides might also exercise restraint. Israeli analysts said Israel hoped the risk of escalation would be outweighed by the demonstration of its military and intelligence prowess, allowing it to strike within Tehran.
Iran and Hezbollah, the most powerful of the groups aligned with Tehran, may want to avoid a full-blown war with Israel, a key ally and military partner of the United States. Washington could also impose more sanctions, inflicting further damage on Iran’s already struggling economy.
Yoel Guzansky, a former official on Israel’s National Security Council who is now a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, said the events were unlikely to alter the balance of power in the region or Israel’s conflict with Hamas but would send a strong signal to Iran and its partners.
“It shows them they cannot be safe anywhere, even in Tehran,” he said. “This is Israel getting some of its reputation for deterrence back.”
The United States — which is navigating its own standoff with Iran and its allies in Iraq, Syria and Yemen — was quick on Wednesday to distance itself from Haniyeh’s killing. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the Biden administration was not warned of the attack ahead of time and played no part in it. “This is something we were not aware of or involved in,” he said in a TV interview in Singapore, without ascribing responsibility to Israel or anyone else.
Blinken declined to say what the attack might mean for the months of stop-and-start negotiations to reach a cease-fire deal in Gaza, one mediators hoped would also secure the release of Israeli hostages still held by Hamas. Talks were held earlier this week in Rome, before the attacks in Beirut and Tehran.
“The best way to bring the temperature down everywhere is through the cease-fire,” Blinken said. “That’s why the focus on the cease-fire needs to remain for us.”
But the death of Haniyeh, who played a central role in the talks along with Yehiya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, threatened to torpedo negotiations.
Haniyeh was “someone who saw the value of a deal and was instrumental to getting certain breakthroughs in the talks,” according to a diplomat briefed on the recent cease-fire discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment on the negotiations.
A further delay in the talks would be a blow to civilians in Gaza and the families of Israeli hostages still held in captivity there. But it could be welcomed by Netanyahu, who has been accused of seeking to slow or derail the negotiations by introducing last-minute demands. The prime minister returned Sunday from a U.S. trip in which he was pressed at nearly every event to reach a deal with Hamas.
Netanyahu, in his address on Wednesday evening, signaled that he would not back down. Everything Israel has achieved in recent months, “we achieved because we did not give in, because we made courageous decisions despite the great pressure at home and abroad,” he told Israelis. “And I tell you: This was not easy.”
The Israeli military, without commenting on the events in Tehran, said it was not implementing precautionary measures across the country Wednesday. Netanyahu held a midday meeting with commanders at the country’s military headquarters in Tel Aviv.
Israel’s silence about the killing of one of its chief adversaries was in keeping with its posture following previous high-profile strikes and assassinations around the region, a “strategic ambiguity” that allows it to avoid official responsibility for extraterritorial operations while benefiting from the deterrent effect. After the missile strike in Iranian territory in the spring — following a barrage of rockets and drones fired from Iran toward Israel — official channels were quiet.
At a military exercise in northern Israel, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the IDF chief of staff, did not mention Haniyeh but did address Tuesday’s attack in Beirut and boasted of his country’s ability to reach targets in other countries. “The IDF knows how to operate and reach a certain window in a neighborhood in Beirut; it knows as well how to target a certain point underground,” he said.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant suggested that Israel would continue to seek a negotiated deal to release hostages still held by Hamas.
“Especially during these times, the state of Israel is working to achieve a framework for the release of hostages,” Gallant said in a call Wednesday with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, according to a spokesperson.
John Kirby, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council, said that further escalation following Haniyeh’s death was not “inevitable.”
“There’s no signs that an escalation is imminent,” he told reporters in Washington. “But I also said that we watch it very, very closely.”
Within hours Wednesday, analysts began asking what purpose the killings served. In the case of Shukr, which Israel has taken responsibility for, the Israeli military eliminated the Hezbollah leader it considered the group’s operational mastermind.
The IDF said it was specifically targeting the official responsible for the rocket attack that killed 12, all children and teenagers, on a village soccer field in the occupied Golan Heights. But beyond that, Shukr was a longtime lieutenant to Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah and seen by the IDF as the group’s “senior military commander.”
“For Hezbollah, the loss is very, very operational,” said Matthew Levitt, a former senior U.S. official now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “For Hamas, the loss is very, very political. But in both cases, [they] lost key interlocutors who were key people representing their group to Iran.”
Haniyeh, who lived in Gaza for years before relocating to Qatar and then Turkey, was a crucial liaison between Hamas and the rest of the world. But his position at the top of the Hamas hierarchy has been in question since Sinwar, who has remained in Gaza, launched the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and began wielding increasing power over the movement.
Still, Haniyeh’s assassination drew condemnation from across the Arab and Muslim world, including vows of revenge from Iran and its allies.
“The criminal and terrorist Zionist regime martyred our beloved guest inside our house and made us mournful, but it paved the way for a harsh punishment to be imposed on it,” Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in a statement Wednesday, according to state-run media.
In Tehran’s Palestine Square, a giant banner draped from a building showed Haniyeh’s photo below a message written in Hebrew: “Wait for harsh punishment.”
In the occupied West Bank, hundreds of Palestinian protesters waved green Hamas flags and condemned Haniyeh’s death.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels, whom Israel targeted in an air attack in July, said they would forge ahead with support for Palestinians and “continue the path of resistance until victory.”
The head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, called it a “cowardly act and dangerous development.”
Egypt’s Foreign Ministry, which has also played a key role in mediation with Hamas, condemned “the dangerous Israeli policy of escalation,” which it said undermines efforts to end the fighting and human suffering in Gaza.
Qatar, which has hosted Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders at Washington’s request for years, also said in a statement that the killing was a “dangerous escalation, and a flagrant violation of international and humanitarian law.”
“Political assassinations & continued targeting of civilians in Gaza while talks continue leads us to ask, how can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?” Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, the country’s prime minister and foreign minister, said in a statement on social media. “Peace needs serious partners.”
Susannah George in Dubai, Lior Soroka and Miriam Berger in Jerusalem, Sarah Dadouch in Beirut, Hazem Balousha and Heba Farouk Mahfouz in Cairo, Hajar Harb in London, and Karen DeYoung and Dan Lamothe in Washington contributed to this report.
