Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran

Ismail Haniyeh

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed by a predawn airstrike in the Iranian capital Wednesday, Iran and the militant group said, blaming Israel for a shock assassination that risks escalating the conflict even as the U.S. and other nations were scrambling to prevent an all-out regional war.

There was no immediate comment from Israel, which has vowed to kill Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders over the group’s Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel. The strike came just after Haniyeh had attended the inauguration of Iran’s new president in Tehran, Iran said.

The dramatic predawn killing of Hamas’s top political leader threatened to reverberate on multiple fronts. The blow of striking Haniyeh in Tehran could trigger direct retaliation against Israel by Iran. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian vowed his country would “defend its territory” and make the attackers “regret their cowardly action.”

The two bitter regional rivals had an unprecedented exchange of strikes on each other’s soil in April after Israel hit Iran’s embassy in Damascus, but international efforts succeeded in containing that cycle of retaliation before it spun out of control. An influential Iranian parliamentary committee on national security and foreign policy was to hold an emergency meeting on the strike later Wednesday.

Hamas could pull out of negotiations for a cease-fire and hostage release deal in the 10-month-old war in Gaza, which U.S. mediators had said were making progress.

And the killing could enflame already heightening tensions between Israel and Iran’s powerful Lebanese ally Hezbollah — which international diplomats were trying to contain after a weekend rocket attack that killed 12 young people in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.

Hours before the Tehran strike, Israel carried out a rare strike in the Lebanese capital on Tuesday that it said killed a top Hezbollah commander allegedly behind the rocket strike. Hezbollah, which denied any role in the Golan strike, said Wednesday that it was still searching for the body of Fouad Shukur in the rubble of the building that was hit in a Beirut suburb that is the group’s stronghold.