Iran held a funeral ceremony on Thursday with calls for revenge after the killing in Tehran of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in a strike blamed on Israel.
The Islamic republic's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei led prayers for Haniyeh ahead of his burial in Qatar, having earlier threatened a "harsh punishment" for his killing.
Iran's Revolutionary Guards announced Haniyeh's death the day before. They said he and a bodyguard were killed in a strike on their accommodation in the Iranian capital on Wednesday.
It came just hours after Israel targeted and killed top Hezbollah commander Fuad Sukr in a retaliatory strike on the Lebanese capital Beirut, raising fears of a wider regional conflict as the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza continues unabated.
Israel has declined to comment on the Tehran strike.
Iran's state TV showed the coffins of Haniyeh and his bodyguard covered in Palestinian flags during the ceremony attended by senior Iranian officials including President Masoud Pezeshkian and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps chief, General Hossein Salami.
Haniyeh had been visiting Tehran for Pezeshkian's inauguration ceremony on Tuesday.
Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas's foreign relations chief, vowed during the funeral ceremony that Haniyeh's message will live on and "we will pursue Israel until it is uprooted from the land of Palestine".
On 1 August, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) did report that they killed Mohammed Deif, Hamas' longtime shadowy military leader and one of the alleged masterminds of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that sparked the war in Gaza. The Israeli military said it killed Deif in a massive strike in southern Gaza on July 13, citing “an intelligence assessment.” There was no immediate comment from Hamas officials on Israel's claim.
Destroyed US hopes
Israel's suspected killing of Hamas' political leader in the heart of Tehran comes after a week in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised U.S. lawmakers he would continue his war against Hamas until “total victory,” showing an Israeli leader ever more openly at odds with Biden administration efforts to calm the region through diplomacy.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking on an Asia trip told reporters there that Washington had not been aware of the attack on Haniyeh.
The US remains focused on a cease-fire in the 9-month-old Israeli war in Gaza “as the best way to bring the temperature down everywhere,” Blinken said after Haniyeh's killing.
The targeting, and timing, of the overnight strike may have all but destroyed U.S. hopes for now.
“I just don't see how a cease-fire is feasible right now with the assassination of the person you would have been negotiating with,” said Vali Nasr, a former U.S. diplomat now at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
300 days since 7 October
If the expected cycles of retaliation and counter-retaliation ahead start unspooling as feared, Haniyeh's killing could mark the end of Biden administration's hopes of restraining escalatory actions as Israel targets what Netanyahu calls Iran's “axis of terror," in the wake of Hamas' October 7 attacks in Israel.
And with the US political campaign entering its final months, it will be more difficult for the Biden administration to break away, if it wants to, from an ally it is bound to through historical, security, economic and political ties.
Meanwhile France, while not directly commenting on the latest escalation in the middle east, comemmorated the fact that the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October are now in their 300th day of captivity.
"Our thoughts are with the hostages held for 300 days by Hamas. France continues to work for their release," according to a post on social media by French President Emmanuel Macron.
(With newswires)
