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Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was in Tehran to attend the inauguration of Iran’s newly elected president Masoud Pezeshkian when he was killed in a targeted missile strike.
Haniyeh, 61, was assassinated at around 2am local time on Wednesday, Iran's Revolutionary Guard said.
One of his bodyguards was also killed in the attack carried out by the "Zionist entity", it said, referring to Israel.
While Israel has not claimed responsibility for the attack, the incident is seen as a signficant escalation that could take the wider Middle East another step towards a new regional war.
Israel is already involved in a brutal conflict in Gaza, where the UN says 90 per cent of the population has now been displaced and, according to the region’s Hamas-run health ministry, more than 39,000 Palestinians have been killed.
Israel has targeted a number of prominent Hamas leaders since the Palestinian group attacked southern Israel last October, killing 1,130 people and taking 251 hostage, although Haniyeh would be the most senior yet if Israel’s involvement is confirmed.
“They are living on borrowed time,” Israel's defence minister Yoav Gallant said of Hamas’s leadership following the 7 October attack.
Iran joined Russia, Turkey and the Palestinian Authority in condemning the killing of Haniyeh, described as the ”overall leader” of Hamas and the head of its political wing, a key figure in its efforts at international diplomacy.
His reputation as a relative moderate among Hamas leaders gained him favour with Arab diplomats, and he spent most of his time between Turkey and Qatar’s capital Doha.
He was “leading the political battle for Hamas with Arab governments,” Adeeb Ziadeh, a specialist in Palestinian affairs at Qatar University, told Reuters. “He was the political and diplomatic front of Hamas.”
Haniyeh rose swiftly through the ranks of Hamas after being appointed to head the office of the group’s founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 1997.
He had spent time in Israeli prisons and a year in exile in Lebanon.
In 2006, a year after the Israeli military withdrew from the ground in Gaza, Hamas won a parliamentary election in the occupied territories and Haniyeh was elected the "prime minister of the state of Palestine”.
He stepped down in 2017 and was appointed to head the group's political wing.
He was succeeded as the Hamas leader in Gaza by Yahya Sinwar, a comrade of Haniyeh since the group's founding years.
Haniyeh left Gaza in 2019, escaping the Israeli siege of the territory, and living between bases in Turkey and Qatar enabled him to direct ceasefire talks, often face-to-face.
He also played a major role in shoring up Hamas's fighting capacity, partly by nurturing ties with Iran, which has made no secret of its support for the group.
It was not clear if and how Haniyeh was involved in the October attack, which was allegedly directed by Sinwar, a hardliner who spent more than two decades in Israeli prisons.
Haniyeh lost three sons, named Hazem, Amir and Mohammad, in an Israeli airstrike on their car in Gaza in April. He also lost four grandchildren, three girls and a boy, in the attack, Hamas said.
He reportedly had 13 children.
Haniyeh denied Israeli claims that his sons were Hamas fighters.
"The interests of the Palestinian people are placed ahead of everything," he said when asked if their killing would impact truce talks.
"All our people and all the families of Gaza residents have paid a heavy price with the blood of their children, and I am one of them," he said, adding that at least 60 members of his family had been killed in the war.
Reacting to Haniyah’s assassination, Hamas on Wednesday held Israel responsible for “grave escalation that aims to break the will of Hamas” and vowed retaliation, undermining the chances of a ceasefire that the slain leader had reportedly been negotiating.
The group called for mass demonstrations and a general strike on Wednesday.
His son, Abdul Salam Haniyeh, said: “My father survived four assassination attempts during his patriotic journey, and today Allah has granted him the martyrdom that he always wished for. He was very keen to establish national unity and strived for the unity of all Palestinian factions and we affirm that this assassination will not deter the resistance, which will fight until freedom is achieved.”
Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas called Haniyeh’s killing a “cowardly act and dangerous development”.
