Haniyeh’s Assassination Brings The Region Closer To An All-Out War

The assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran early Wednesday is a major escalation that brings the region closer to an all-out war that Israel claims it does not want, but seems to be doing everything in its power to provoke.

It came hours after Israel bombed Lebanon on Tuesday evening, killing three civilians. Israel claimed that it targeted Fuad Shukr, Hizballah’s most senior military official and its leader Hasan Nasrallah’s close confidant. Hizballah confirmed Shukr’s martyrdom later in the day on Wednesday and said that Nasrallah “will announce our political position tomorrow regarding this crime during the funeral of Commander Shukr.”

In keeping with its standard practice, Israel has not made any official comment on the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh and his bodyguard Wasim Abu Shaaban in the Iranian capital, where the Hamas leader was present for the inauguration of President Masoud Pezeshkian on Tuesday.

During a brief speech on Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned the public that “challenging days are ahead” and said that “[we] will stand united and determined against every threat.”

He did not comment on Haniyeh’s assassination and instead doubled-down on his position not to end the war on Gaza through an agreement reached with Hamas. Referring to international and domestic pressure, Netanyahu said “I did not give in to those voices then, and I don’t give in to them now.”

But at least one Israeli official, heritage minister Amihai Eliyahu, celebrated the killing. He posted on X, formerly Twitter, that “this is the right way to clean the world from this filth.”

“No more imaginary ‘peace’/surrender agreements, no more mercy for these sons of death,” Eliyahu added.

Despite Israel’s official silence, few are in doubt about its responsibility, not least Iran, where the killing of Haniyeh on its soil will be viewed as a major breach of its sovereignty and security.

“The criminal, terrorist Zionist regime martyred our dear guest in our territory and has caused our grief, but it has also prepared the ground for a severe punishment,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, said.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said that Haniyeh and his bodyguard were killed in the residence where they were staying. It added that the attack is under investigation and that details will be released later.

Khalil al-Hayya, a senior Hamas official, said that Haniyeh was “directly” killed in a missile strike that destroyed the windows, doors and walls in the room where he was staying. Al-Hayya added that Israel was aiming to “burn the entire region … because they’ve failed to achieve their goals” in Gaza, rejecting a deal and wanting “to continue their aggression despite all the failure.”

Among Haniyeh’s last public words are those he made to Khamenei one day before his murder. Haniyeh told the Iranian leader how he had lost more than 60 members of his family in Gaza during Israel’s genocide, including three sons, a sister and many grandchildren.

Following Israel’s killing of several of his family members in April, Haniyeh said “the blood of my children and grandchildren is not more precious than the blood of the children of the Palestinian people.”

“I thank God for this honor that He has bestowed upon me by the martyrdom of my three sons and some of my grandchildren,” Haniyeh added.

After the news of Ismail Haniyeh’s murder, his eldest son Abd al-Salam said, “we have accustomed ourselves to receive the news of martyrdom, like all our people, we have accustomed ourselves to victory or martyrdom.”

He added that Israel was “deluded” if it thought murdering leaders of the resistance would halt the Palestinian struggle for liberation.

Ismail Haniyeh was born in 1962 in Gaza’s Beach refugee camp to a family originally from the Palestinian city of Majdal Asqalan, renamed Ashkelon after the Zionist conquest of the city in 1948.

In the early 1980s he studied literature at the Islamic University of Gaza and joined the Islamic student bloc.

He was active during the first intifada, the mass uprising in the occupied Gaza Strip and the West Bank that began in 1987, the same year Hamas was founded. Haniyeh was one of the group’s early members, becoming a close confidant to its founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was assassinated by Israel in 2004.

As an activist against the occupation, Haniyeh was repeatedly jailed by Israel, his longest stint in its prisons lasting three years. After that, in 1992, he was among hundreds of Palestinian leaders and activists expelled by Israel to Lebanon.

He returned to Gaza after the signing of the Oslo accords between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel in 1993. In 1997, he became the assistant to Sheikh Yassin.

Yassin had just been released from prison by Israel following a failed Israeli assassination attempt on senior Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Amman, Jordan, in which Israeli agents had sprayed a toxin into Meshaal’s ear. King Hussein of Jordan demanded that Israel provide the antidote, which it did, and that it release Yassin.

When he returned to Gaza, Haniyeh also returned to the modest family home in which he was born and raised in the Beach refugee camp. Haniyeh became a well-known and popular leader across Gaza, in part by regularly giving sermons during Friday prayers in mosques across the territory.

In 2006, following Hamas’ victory in the Palestinian Authority legislative elections in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, Haniyeh became prime minister of a short-lived national unity government. That government was ended by a plot, backed by the United States, to overthrow Hamas using militias affiliated with its main rival Fatah, which had fully controlled the Palestinian Authority up to that point.

The US-backed coup succeeded in the West Bank but failed in Gaza. Haniyeh remained as prime minister in Gaza as Israel imposed a devastating siege on the territory with the support and complicity of the US, the European Union, Canada, some Arab states and the Palestinian Authority run by Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah.

Haniyeh was known as a conciliator among Palestinian factions and in 2014 he stepped down as prime minister in Gaza in a fresh attempt to achieve national unity. This followed the signing of an accord with a Palestine Liberation Organization delegation known as the Shati agreement, because it was signed in Haniyeh’s home in al-Shati camp, as Beach camp is called in Arabic.

But the obstacles in the way of unity – principally the PA’s insistence on maintaining its collaboration with Israel and objections from the Ramallah government’s foreign sponsors – torpedoed every attempt to overcome the divide.

In May 2017, Haniyeh was elected head of the politburo of Hamas, succeeding Khaled Meshaal. This coincided with Hamas’ launch of a new political charter that affirmed the group’s independence from the Muslim Brotherhood.

The document indicated Hamas’ readiness to accept a Palestinian state within the West Bank and Gaza.

The new charter stated that the “conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.”

The revised charter also stated that resistance, including armed resistance, “is a legitimate right” guaranteed by international law. But it also signaled that armed resistance was a means to an end, and that if those ends – Palestinian liberation and self-determination – could be achieved by political means, Hamas was ready for that.

Hamas had hoped that these far-reaching concessions and political overtures would gain it admission to the international political arena, in a manner similar to the Irish republican movement Sinn Fein and its associated armed wing, the IRA.

Hamas also supported the mass protests in Gaza beginning in 2018 known as the Great March of Return – an effort to win international support and pressure on Israel to end the siege of Gaza. Israel responded by sending military snipers to murder and maim thousands of unarmed civilians.

Met with adamant rejectionism from Israel and the US to all its political overtures, Hamas saw no option but continued and escalating armed resistance, culminating in the al-Aqsa Flood operation of 7 October 2023.

With his assumption of the role as Hamas’ top leader, Haniyeh relocated from Gaza to Doha. From the Qatari capital he could conduct international diplomacy and negotiations, including a central role in the so far unsuccessful efforts to achieve an end to Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and a mutual exchange of detainees.

Following the assassination of Haniyeh, Israel reaffirmed that it still seeks a deal to free its captives in Gaza, a perverse and cynical statement after it murdered its chief Palestinian interlocutor.

Haniyeh was seen by Palestinians as a major and popular national leader and had gained widespread international recognition, serving as an interlocutor with major world capitals including Moscow, Beijing and Ankara. An opinion poll conducted in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in March, six months into Israel’s genocide, showed him winning 70 percent of the vote in a potential match-up against Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas.

After the January assassination of Haniyeh’s deputy and key negotiator Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut – an act also widely attributed to Israel – the now departed head of Hamas stated:

“A movement that offers its leaders and founders as martyrs for the dignity of our people and our nation will never be defeated, and such assassinations only make it stronger, more resilient and more determined.”

Ali Abunimah

The Electronic Intifada

Cover Photograph- Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh during a Great March of Return protest along Gaza’s boundary with Israel in May 2018. Mahmoud KhattabAPA images

Ali Abunimah is founder editor of The Electronic Intifada. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.

Research contributed by Maureen Clare Murphy