Ismail Haniyeh should have known that Tehran wasn’t a safe place for him to be. What has Israel ever wanted to do on Iranian territory that it hasn’t been able to accomplish? In 2018, it stole the country’s entire nuclear archive. In 2020, it killed Iran’s top nuclear-weapons official. In 2022 and 2023, it reportedly abducted, interrogated, and then released security officials who were planning actions against Israeli tourists in the region—and it did this entirely on Iranian soil. Such extensive operations show that Mossad has deeply penetrated Iran’s security architecture, much as it has in the hit Israeli TV show Tehran.
Details are still emerging about the strike on Haniyeh, Hamas’s highest-ranking political leader, who was killed in Tehran in the early hours today. The assassination comes at an incredibly tense moment, less than 24 hours after Israel used an air strike to take out Fuad Shukr, a top Hezbollah official, in Beirut. Hezbollah has not confirmed Shukr dead, and Israel has not taken responsibility for the attack on Haniyeh. But fingers will naturally point to the country with both the capacity and the motive to go after the Hamas leader.
Israel has a history of targeting militant leaders behind the killing of its citizens. Palestinian militants massacred Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972, and Israel responded with Operation Wrath of God, a string of assassinations of militant leaders all over the world that ended only in 1988. Israel was always going to find and kill Haniyeh, a leader of the group that perpetrated October 7, the most lethal terror attack in the country’s history.
But the 62-year-old Haniyeh, used to safely hobnobbing with dignitaries in Qatar and Turkey, presumably didn’t expect such a brazen attempt on his life in the Iranian capital, where he had been staying for a few days to attend the inauguration of President Masoud Pezeshkian. He was killed before the arrest warrant that prosecutors at the International Criminal Court requested for him could be ever issued (the court has also requested a warrant to arrest Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu).
The extent of Israeli ease of operations in Iran is jaw-dropping. The Islamic Republic likes to claim that even if Iran is not democratic, free, or prosperous, at least it’s safe and secure. The regime enrolls tens of thousands of men in an alphabet soup of security forces—and yet it can’t seem to guard even highly valued guests, such as Haniyeh.
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