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Fears of Middle East War Grow After Hamas Leader's Killing

Smoke billows on the village of Meiss El-Jabal, along Lebanon's southern border with northern Israel following Israeli bombardment on December 20, 2023, with the Israeli Manara Kibbutz seen on the background, amid increasing cross-border tensions as fighting continues with Hamas militants in the southern Gaza Strip. (Photo by AFP)
Smoke billows on the village of Meiss El-Jabal, along Lebanon's southern border with northern Israel following Israeli bombardment on December 20, 2023, with the Israeli Manara Kibbutz seen on the background, amid increasing cross-border tensions as fighting continues with Hamas militants in the southern Gaza Strip. (Photo by AFP)
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Fears of Middle East War Grow After Hamas Leader's Killing

Smoke billows on the village of Meiss El-Jabal, along Lebanon's southern border with northern Israel following Israeli bombardment on December 20, 2023, with the Israeli Manara Kibbutz seen on the background, amid increasing cross-border tensions as fighting continues with Hamas militants in the southern Gaza Strip. (Photo by AFP)
Smoke billows on the village of Meiss El-Jabal, along Lebanon's southern border with northern Israel following Israeli bombardment on December 20, 2023, with the Israeli Manara Kibbutz seen on the background, amid increasing cross-border tensions as fighting continues with Hamas militants in the southern Gaza Strip. (Photo by AFP)

Fears of a regional Middle East war grew on Saturday after the assassination of Hamas's political leader, blamed on Israel, triggered vows of vengeance from Iran-backed Middle East groups.

The United States said it would move additional warships and fighter jets to the region as the Iran-aligned "Axis of Resistance" readied its response to the killing of Ismail Haniyeh.

The groups from Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Syria have already been drawn into the nearly 10-month war in Gaza between Israel and the Palestinian movement Hamas, according to AFP.

Iran on Saturday said it expects one of those groups, Lebanon's Hezbollah, to hit deeper inside Israel and to no longer be confined to military targets.

With such talk growing, the Pentagon said it was bolstering its military presence in the Middle East to protect US personnel and defend Israel.

An aircraft carrier strike group led by the USS Abraham Lincoln will replace one helmed by the USS Theodore Roosevelt in the region, the Pentagon said.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also ordered additional ballistic missile defence-capable cruisers and destroyers to the Middle East and areas under United States European Command, as well as a new fighter squadron to the Middle East.

On Friday, thousands of people in Qatar attended funeral prayers for Haniyeh, who was buried north of the capital Doha two days after his death.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards on Saturday said he was killed by a "short-range projectile" fired "from outside the accommodation area" where he was staying.

Haniyeh had been in Iran to attend the swearing-in of President Masoud Pezeshkian on Tuesday.

Israel, accused by Hamas, Iran and others of the attack, has not directly commented on it.
The killing of the Qatar-based Haniyeh is among a series of tit-for-tat attacks since April that had already heightened fears of a regional conflagration.

His death came hours after Israel struck south Beirut, killing the Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr.

Haniyeh's deputy was killed in south Beirut early this year in a strike which a US defence official said Israel carried out.

In another high-profile killing, Israel's army on Thursday confirmed that an air strike in July killed Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif in Gaza.

Israel "delivered crushing blows to all our enemies", said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week.

"The risk that the situation on the ground could deteriorate rapidly is rising," British Foreign Secretary David Lammy said in a statement.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant met with his visiting British counterpart John Healey on Friday and called for an international coalition to support "Israel's defense against Iran and its proxies", Gallant's office said.

Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas in retaliation for its October 7 attack.

Hamas officials but also some analysts, and protesters in Israel, have accused Netanyahu of prolonging the war.

Far-right members crucial to Netanyahu's ruling coalition oppose any truce.

The war in Gaza has caused widespread destruction and displaced almost the entire population of the territory where, the UN said on Friday, public health conditions "continue to deteriorate."

It said nearly 40,000 cases of Hepatitis A, spread by contaminated food and water, have been reported since the war began.

Since October Hezbollah has been exchanging near-daily fire with Israeli forces, saying it is targeting military positions over the border in support of Hamas.

The strike on Shukr changed the calculus, Iran's mission to the United Nations said on Saturday.

"We expect... Hezbollah to choose more targets and (strike) deeper in its response," said the mission, quoted by Iran's official IRNA news agency.

"Secondly, that it will not limit its response to military targets."

A Lebanese security source, requesting anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the media, said a Hezbollah member was killed in an "Israeli drone" strike on a vehicle in south Lebanon on Saturday.

Late on Friday, a source close to Hezbollah said Israel carried out strikes on a convoy of trucks entering Lebanon from Syria.

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Tough-Talking Haniyeh Was Seen as the More Moderate Face of Hamas 

Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh speaks during a press briefing after his meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian in Tehran, Iran, March 26, 2024. (AP)
Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh speaks during a press briefing after his meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian in Tehran, Iran, March 26, 2024. (AP)
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Tough-Talking Haniyeh Was Seen as the More Moderate Face of Hamas 

Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh speaks during a press briefing after his meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian in Tehran, Iran, March 26, 2024. (AP)
Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh speaks during a press briefing after his meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian in Tehran, Iran, March 26, 2024. (AP)

Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader who was killed in Iran, was the tough-talking face of the Palestinian group's international diplomacy as war raged back in Gaza, where three of his sons were killed in an Israeli airstrike.

But despite the rhetoric, he was seen by many diplomats as a moderate compared to the more hardline members of the Iran-backed group inside Gaza.

Appointed to the Hamas top job in 2017, Haniyeh moved between Türkiye's and Qatar's capital Doha, escaping the travel curbs of the blockaded Gaza Strip and enabling him to act as a negotiator in ceasefire talks or to talk to Hamas' ally Iran.

Hamas fighters launched on Oct. 7 a raid which killed 1,200 people in Israel, according to Israeli tallies, and took another 250 or so to hold as hostages in Gaza, one of the most crowded places on earth.

Israel's response to the strike has been a military campaign that has killed more than 39,000 people inside Gaza so far, and bombed much of the enclave into rubble, according to health authorities in the territory.

In May, the International Criminal Court prosecutor's office requested arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, including Haniyeh, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged war crimes. Israel and Palestinian leaders have dismissed the allegations.

SONS KILLED IN AIRSTRIKE

Hamas' 1988 founding charter called for the destruction of Israel, although Hamas leaders have at times offered a long-term truce with Israel in return for a viable Palestinian state on all Palestinian territory occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. Israel regards this as a ruse.

Hamas also sent suicide bombers into Israel in the 1990s and 2000s.

In 2012, when asked by Reuters if Hamas had abandoned the armed struggle, Haniyeh replied "of course not" and said resistance would continue "in all forms - popular resistance, political, diplomatic and military resistance".

Three of Haniyeh's sons - Hazem, Amir and Mohammad - were killed on April 10 when an Israeli air strike struck the car they were driving, Hamas said. Haniyeh also lost four of his grandchildren, three girls and a boy, in the attack, Hamas said.

Haniyeh had denied Israeli assertions that his sons were fighters for the group, and said "the interests of the Palestinian people are placed ahead of everything" when asked if their killing would impact truce talks.

"All our people and all the families of Gaza residents have paid a heavy price with the blood of their children, and I am one of them," he said, adding that at least 60 members of his family were killed in the war.

Yet for all the tough language in public, Arab diplomats and officials had viewed him as relatively pragmatic compared with more hardline voices inside Gaza, where the military wing of Hamas planned the Oct. 7 attack.

While telling Israel's military they would find themselves "drowning in the sands of Gaza", he and his predecessor as Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, had shuttled around the region for talks over a Qatari-brokered ceasefire deal with Israel that would include exchanging hostages for Palestinians in Israeli jails as well as more aid for Gaza.

Israel regards the entire Hamas leadership as terrorists, and has accused Haniyeh, Meshaal and others of continuing to "pull the strings of the Hamas terror organization".

But how much Haniyeh knew about the Oct. 7 assault beforehand is not clear. The plan, drawn up by the Hamas military council in Gaza, was such a closely guarded secret that some Hamas officials seemed shocked by its timing and scale.

Yet Haniyeh, had a major hand building up Hamas' fighting capacity, partly by nurturing ties with Iran, which makes no secret of its support for the group.

During the decade in which Haniyeh was Hamas' top leader in Gaza, Israel accused his leadership team of helping to divert humanitarian aid to the group's military wing. Hamas denied it.

SHUTTLE DIPLOMACY

When he left Gaza in 2017, Haniyeh was succeeded by Yahya Sinwar, a hardliner who spent more than two decades in Israeli prisons and whom Haniyeh had welcomed back to Gaza in 2011 after a prisoner exchange.

"Haniyeh is leading the political battle for Hamas with Arab governments," Adeeb Ziadeh, a specialist in Palestinian affairs at Qatar University, said before his death, adding that he had close ties with more hardline figures in the group and the military wing. "He is the political and diplomatic front of Hamas," Ziadeh said.

Haniyeh and Meshaal had met officials in Egypt, which has also had a mediation role in the ceasefire talks. Haniyeh travelled in early November to Tehran to meet Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei, Iranian state media reported.

Three senior officials told Reuters that Khamenei had told the Hamas leader in that meeting that Iran would not enter the war having not been told about it in advance. Hamas did not respond to requests for comment before Reuters published its report, and then issued a denial after its publication.

As a young man, Haniyeh was a student activist at the Islamic University in Gaza City. He joined Hamas when it was created in the First Palestinian intifada (uprising) in 1987. He was arrested and briefly deported.

Haniyeh became a protégé of Hamas' founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, who like Haniyeh's family, was a refugee from the village of Al Jura near Ashkelon. In 1994, he told Reuters that Yassin was a model for young Palestinians, saying: "We learned from him love of Islam and sacrifice for this Islam and not to kneel down to these tyrants and despots."

By 2003 he was a trusted Yassin aide, photographed in Yassin's Gaza home holding a phone to the almost completely paralyzed Hamas founder's ear so that he could take part in a conversation. Yassin was assassinated by Israel in 2004.

Haniyeh was an early advocate of Hamas entering politics. In 1994, he said that forming a political party "would enable Hamas to deal with emerging developments".

Initially overruled by the Hamas leadership, it was later approved and Haniyeh become Palestinian prime minister after the group won Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 a year after Israel's military withdrew from Gaza.

The group took control of Gaza in 2007.

In 2012, when asked by Reuters reporters if Hamas had abandoned the armed struggle, Haniyeh replied "of course not" and said resistance would continue "in all forms - popular resistance, political, diplomatic and military resistance".