Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran, Iran’s paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said early Wednesday.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the assassination but suspicion immediately fell on Israel, which has vowed to kill Haniyeh and other leaders of Hamas over the group’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people and took about 250 others hostage.
Analysts on Iranian state television immediately began blaming Israel for the attack.
Israel did not immediately comment, but it often doesn’t when it comes to assassinations carried out by its Mossad intelligence agency.
Hamas said Haniyeh was killed “in a Zionist airstrike on his residence in Tehran after he participated in the inauguration of Iran’s new president.”
“Hamas declares to the great Palestinian people and the people of the Arab and Islamic nations and all the free people of the world, brother leader Ismail Haniyeh a martyr,” the terse statement said.
In another statement, the group quoted Haniyeh as saying that the Palestinian cause has “costs” and “we are ready for these costs: martyrdom for the sake of Palestine, and for the sake of God Almighty, and for the sake of the dignity of this nation.”
Hamas officials did not immediately respond to requests for further comment.
In April, an Israeli airstrike in Gaza killed three of Haniyeh’s sons and four of his grandchildren.
In an interview with the Al Jazeera satellite channel at the time, Haniyeh said the killings would not pressure Hamas into softening its positions amid ongoing cease-fire negotiations with Israel.
Haniyeh was in Tehran to attend Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s swearing-in ceremony on Tuesday. Iran gave no details on how Haniyeh was killed, and the Revolutionary Guard said the attack was under investigation.
Haniyeh left the Gaza Strip in 2019 and had lived in exile in Qatar. The top Hamas leader in Gaza is Yahya Sinwar, who masterminded the Oct. 7 attack.
There was no immediate reaction from the White House. The killing comes at a precarious time, as the Biden administration has tried to push Hamas and Israel to agree to at least a temporary cease-fire and hostage release deal.
CIA Director William Burns was in Rome on Sunday to meet with senior Israeli, Qatari and Egyptian officials in the latest round of talks. Separately, Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, is in the region for negotiations with U.S. partners.
Israel is suspected of running a years-long assassination campaign targeting Iranian nuclear scientists and others associated with its atomic program. In 2020, a top Iranian military nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was killed by a remote-controlled machine gun while traveling in a car outside Tehran.
In Israel’s war against Hamas since the October attack, more than 39,360 Palestinians have been killed and more than 90,900 wounded, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, whose count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.