Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ supreme leader in exile, was killed in an Israeli air strike in Tehran on Wednesday July 31 at the age of 62.
He was killed at his residence in Tehran after attending the swearing-in ceremony of Iran’s new President. Haniyeh’s death makes him the latest Hamas official to be killed by Israel since the Hamas-led assault last October, which killed 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages.
The devastating Israel-Hamas war has become the deadliest and longest in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
While Hamas’ Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar is believed to have been the mastermind of the October 7 attacks, Haniyeh, who had been seen as a more moderate force in Hamas, lauded them as a humiliating blow to Israel’s aura of invincibility.
He said in a speech in Iran during the funeral of late Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in May, “The Al-Aqsa flood was an earthquake that struck the heart of the Zionist entity and has made major changes at the world level. We will continue the resistance against this enemy until we liberate our land, all our land.”
Michael Milshtein, a Hamas expert at Tel Aviv University, said Haniyeh had a commanding role in the group’s foreign policy and diplomacy but was less involved in military affairs.
Israel has pledged to target all of Hamas’ leaders following the attacks and has gradually worked to fulfill that promise.
Haniyeh was detained by Israeli authorities in 1989 for being a member of Hamas and spent three years in jail before being deported to Lebanon in 1992.
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