HAMAS leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Iran today, the Palestinian militant group Hamas and Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards said in separate statements according to news reports. 

The Islamist faction mourned the death of Haniyeh, who it said was killed in “a treacherous Zionist raid on his residence in Tehran”. 

Hanieh attended Iran’s new president’s swearing-in ceremony yesterday. 

“Early this morning, the residence of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran was struck, resulting in his and one of his bodyguards’ martyrdoms. The cause is under investigation and will be announced soon,” the Revolutionary Guards said in the statement. 

Haniyeh is the international face of Hamas and the most senior leader of the Palestinian resistance group to be assassinated by Israel since the 2004 attack that killed its spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in Gaza.   

The 62-year-old Haniyeh was head of Hamas’s political bureau and had been living in Qatar since 2023.

Israel had imprisoned Haniyeh for three years in 1989 as it cracked down on the first Palestinian uprising. 

He was then exiled in 1992 to a no-man’s-land between Israel and Lebanon, along with several Hamas leaders. 

Haniyeh was appointed Palestine’s prime minister in 2006 by President Mahmoud Abbas after Hamas won the most seats in national elections, but he was dismissed a year later after the group ousted Abbas’s Fatah party from the Gaza Strip in a week of deadly violence. 

Haniyeh rejected his sacking as “unconstitutional”, stressing that his government “would not abandon its national responsibilities towards the Palestinian people”, and continued to rule in Gaza. 

In 2018, the US Department of State designated Haniyeh as a terrorist. – July 31, 2024.