Ismail Haniyeh, the chairman of Hamas’s political bureau, was killed while visiting Iran on Wednesday, the Palestinian militant group announced in a statement.
Haniyeh was in Tehran to attend the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, who won a general election in July after former President Ebrahim Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash earlier this year.
The Islamist group said Haniyeh was killed in a “treacherous Zionist raid on his residence in Tehran,” but few details about his death have been released.
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Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps also confirmed the attack, and said more details would be released later.
Haniyeh was attending the inauguration alongside other leaders in Iran’s Axis of Resistance, the Islamic Republic’s coalition of friendly governments like Syria and armed groups in countries including Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon.
The Palestinian leader was elected chairman of Hamas’ political bureau in 2017. Prior to that, he briefly served as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority in 2006, before the feud between Hamas and Fatah descended into violence. He was dismissed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of Fatah, in 2007.
Haniyeh was high on the list of Palestinian leaders wanted by Israel after the Oct. 7 attacks, which saw over 1,000 Israeli citizens killed and about 250 taken hostage by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The ongoing war in Gaza has killed more than 39,000 people in the Palestinian territory, according to the most recent estimates from the Gaza health ministry.
In April, three of Haniyeh’s 13 sons and four of his grandchildren were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a refugee camp in northern Gaza.
“The blood of my children is not more valuable than the blood of the children of the Palestinian people,” Haniyeh said at the time of the attack, Al Jazeera reported. “All the martyrs of Palestine are my children.”
The Israeli Defense Force did not return an immediate request for comment from the Daily Beast.
Haniyeh’s death comes only hours after Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s top military commander, was killed in an airstrike conducted in a suburb of Beirut. Israel claimed responsibility for the strike, targeting the military leader after a rocket strike killed 12 Arab children in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on Saturday. Hezbollah denied responsibility for the attack.
