Hamas Leader Allegedly Assassinated by Israel, but He Wasn't in Gaza When He Died
It’s telling that, when Israel killed a Hamas member generally considered to be one of the chief political leaders behind the group responsible for the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, he wasn’t in the Gaza Strip, which the extremist group continues to hold as a political stronghold.
No, he was in Tehran — and as a state guest of Iran, it’s worth noting, celebrating the swearing-in of the country’s new president.
According to The Associated Press, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed after attending the inauguration of new Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian.
Pezeshkian, a former heart surgeon, was elected after the death of Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in May. While the media has tried to sell him as a reformist, the AP noted that the new president received the blessing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Sunday — who then instructed him to prioritize neighbors and countries that have “supported and helped” Iran.
The president also used his swearing-in speech to say “he considers the normalization of economic relations with the world to be Iran’s inalienable right,” the AP reported.
“I will not stop trying to remove the oppressive sanctions,” he said. “I am optimistic about the future.”
However, this is a whole different problem and one that, no doubt, the world will be grappling with in the very near future. The problem is that, some time between Pezeshkian’s swearing-in on Tuesday and the early hours of Wednesday morning, Hamas announced the death of Haniyeh, the leader of a political group which celebrates hate and death was a celebrated guest of the Iranian government.
“Iran’s Fars news agency, close to the Revolutionary Guard, posted on X that Haniyeh was stationed in the north of Tehran, and a projectile from the air killed him around 2:30 a.m.,” the AP reported shortly after 10 a.m. Tehran time, some seven-and-a-half hours after the alleged strike. “Further investigations are underway and details will be announced later, Fars added.”
“No one immediately claimed responsibility for the assassination but suspicion quickly 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 saw some 250 others taken hostage.”
Hamas, in the meanwhile, said that Haniyeh died “in a Zionist airstrike on his residence in Tehran.”
“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 Ismail Haniyeh a martyr,” the group said in a statement.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency were both more circumspect on the matter, but it’s fairly clear who was looking for the leader of Hamas, and it wasn’t the IRGC or, for that matter, the Americans.
And, keep in mind, he wasn’t the only Palestinian terrorist leader to attend the swearing-in, either. Islamic Jihad’s Ziyad al Nakhaleh was also in the Iranian capital for the ceremony, among other “allies” (the AP’s words) of the regime in Tehran.
Earlier today Ismail Haniyeh participated in the inauguration where they chanted “Death to Israel” and “Death to America”
Less than 12 hours later, Israel and America are alive. He is not.
— AG (@AGHamilton29) July 31, 2024
This comes one day after Hezbollah leader Fouad Shukur — another head of a Tehran-backed terror group, and one that’s been opening up a northern front in the terror war on Israel — was killed in an Israeli strike in Beirut.
And yet, the question the media will likely be asking over this will be if Israel seeks a wider war in the Middle East. Not Iran, where the leaders of several terror groups were guests of honor as the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism installed another president. Israel is a state defending itself against the very groups Iran funds.
And yet, again, the media will stay away from examining the role President Joe Biden’s administration played by being asleep at the wheel when it comes to the danger posed by Iran.
First, it spent the better part of its first few years in office trying to re-enter the suicidal nuclear pact with Tehran. Then, when its proxies attacked Israel, it tried to mute the response of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Iran considers Washington to be its second-biggest enemy, right after the Jewish state. But, the fact is, the Biden administration has a curious knack for the enabling of terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, which wouldn’t be possible without Jerusalem’s biggest ally slumbering about the threat it causes.
One only hopes that when voters go to the ballot box this November, they remember that — and remember that under former President Donald Trump’s administration, this state of affairs was significantly different.
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