Calls for Revenge at Iran Funeral For Hamas Chief Haniyeh

Iran held funeral processions on Thursday with calls for revenge after the killing in Tehran of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in a strike blamed on Israel.
Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei led prayers for Haniyeh ahead of his burial in Qatar, having earlier threatened a "harsh punishment" for his killing, reported Agence France Presse.
In Tehran's city center, thousands of mourning crowds carrying posters of Haniyeh and Palestinian flags gathered for the ceremony at Tehran University before a procession, according to an AFP correspondent.
Haniyeh's death was announced the day before by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, who said he and his bodyguard were killed in a strike on their accommodation in the Iranian capital at 2:00 am (2230 GMT) on Wednesday.
It came just hours after Israel targeted and killed top Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in a retaliatory strike on the Lebanese capital Beirut, sending fears of a wider regional war soaring in fallout from the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
Israel has declined to comment on the Tehran strike.
Iran's state TV showed the coffins of Haniyeh and his bodyguards covered in Palestinian flags during the ceremony attended by senior Iranian officials.
President Masoud Pezeshkian and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps chief, General Hossein Salami, were present. Haniyeh had been visiting Tehran for Pezeshkian's inauguration ceremony on Tuesday.
Senior Hamas figure Khalil al-Hayya, the movement's foreign relations chief, vowed during the funeral ceremony that "Ismail Haniyeh's slogan, 'We will not recognize Israel,' will remain an immortal slogan" and "we will pursue Israel until it is uprooted from the land of Palestine."
Iran's conservative parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said Iran "will certainly carry out the supreme leader's order (to avenge Haniyeh.)"
"It is our duty to respond at the right time and in the right place," he said in a speech with crowds chanting "Death to Israel, Death to America!"
- 'Our duty' -
The caskets, with a black-and-white pattern resembling a Palestinian keffiyeh scarf, were borne on a flower-bedecked truck through leafy streets where cooling water mists sprayed the flag-waving crowds.
Khamenei, who has the final say in Iran's political affairs, said after Haniyeh's death that it was "our duty to seek revenge for his blood as he was martyred in the territory of the Islamic Republic of Iran".
Iran has not yet officially published any information on the exact location of the strike.
Pezeshkian said Wednesday that "the Zionists (Israel) will soon see the consequences of their cowardly and terrorist act".
The international community, however, called for de-escalation and a focus on securing a ceasefire in Gaza -- which Haniyeh had, according to a Hamas official previously, accused Israel of obstructing.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the strikes in Tehran and Beirut represented a "dangerous escalation".
All efforts, he said, should be "leading to a ceasefire" in Gaza and the release of hostages taken during Hamas's October 7 attack on southern Israel which began nearly 10 months of war.
The prime minister of key ceasefire broker Qatar said Haniyeh's killing had thrown the whole mediation process into doubt.
"How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?" Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani said in a post on social media site X.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday called on "all parties" in the Middle East to "stop escalatory actions."
Earlier he said a ceasefire in Gaza was still the "imperative", though White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the twin killings of Haniyeh and Shukr "don't help" regional tensions.
- Tensions inflamed -
While Iran has blamed the attack on its arch-foe, Israel has declined to comment on Haniyeh's death. It did, however, claim the killing of Shukr, whom it blamed for a weekend rocket strike that killed 12 youths in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights.
The killings come with regional tensions already inflamed by the war in Gaza, a conflict that has drawn in Iran-backed militant groups in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen.
One of those groups, Yemen's Houthi group, "declared three days of mourning" for Haniyeh, with political leader Mahdi al-Mashat expressing "condolences to the Palestinian people and Hamas" over his killing, according to the group's Saba news agency.
The United Nations Security Council also convened an emergency meeting Wednesday at Iran's request to discuss the strike.
Hamas has for months been indirectly negotiating a truce and hostage-prisoner exchange deal with Israel, in talks facilitated by Egypt, Qatar and the United States.
Analysts told AFP that Haniyeh was a moderating influence within Hamas, and that while he would be replaced, the dynamics within the group could change.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to destroy Hamas in retaliation for the October 7 attack that ignited war in Gaza.
That attack resulted in the deaths of 1,197 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Militants also seized 251 hostages, 111 of whom are still held captive in Gaza, including 39 the military says are dead.
Concern grew among Israelis over the fate of those still held in Gaza.
Haniyeh's killing "was a mistake as it threatens the possibility of having a hostage deal," said Anat Noy, a resident of the coastal city of Haifa.
Israel's retaliatory campaign against Hamas has killed at least 39,445 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory's health ministry.

As if they aren’t already facing enough, firefighters in California also could encounter fire tornadoes — a rare but dangerous phenomenon in which wildfires create their own weather.

The National Weather Service warned Tuesday that the combination of high winds and severely dry conditions have created a “particularly dangerous situation” in which any new fire could explode in size. The advisory, which runs into Wednesday, didn’t mention tornadoes, but meteorologist Todd Hall said they're possible given the extreme conditions.

A look at fire tornadoes according to The AP.

What is a fire tornado? Fire whirl, fire devil, fire tornado or even firenado — scientists, firefighters and regular folks use multiple terms to describe similar phenomena, and they don’t always agree on what’s what. Some say fire whirls are formed only by heat, while fire tornadoes involve clouds generated by the fire itself.

The National Wildfire Coordinating Group’s glossary of wildland fire terms doesn’t include an entry for fire tornado, but it defines a fire whirl as a “spinning vortex column of ascending hot air and gases rising from a fire and carrying aloft smoke, debris and flame,” and says large whirls “have the intensity of a small tornado.”

Wildfires with turbulent plumes can produce clouds that in turn can produce lightning or a vortex of ash, smoke and flames, said Leila Carvalho, professor of meteorology and climatology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“There is a rotation caused by very strong wind shear and a very hot, localized low-pressure system,” she said.

What is a fire tornado capable of? Fire tornadoes can make fires stronger by sucking up air, Carvalho said. “It creates a tornado track, and wherever this goes, the destruction is like any other tornado.”

In 2018, a fire tornado the size of three football fields killed a firefighter as it exploded in what already was a vast and devastating wildfire near near Redding, about 250 miles (400 kilometers) north of San Francisco in northern California. Scientists later described an ice-capped cloud that reached 7 miles (11 km) into the air and caused winds up to 143 mph (230 kph).

Research also suggests fire tornadoes can carry airborne embers, also called firebrands, over long distances, said James Urban, an assistant professor in the Department of Fire Protection Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. They also can change the fire’s behavior, he said.

“That’s also something that is dangerous and scary for first responders, or really anyone,” he said. “It can change and maybe go in a different direction.”

The interaction between wind, the fire plume and topography determines whether a tornado will develop, he said. For example, sometimes a certain topography will restrict airflow in such a way that a spiral pattern develops.

Can you make one in a lab? Together with San José State University, Worcester Polytech is part of a Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center. In the lab in Worcester, researchers have created small fire tornadoes by putting up walls around a fire or arranging a bunch of little fires that together restrict airflow. But that’s on a much smaller scale than what’s happening with the wildfires.

“We’ve got the biggest fire lab in the US for a university, but we cannot get something the size of what’s been reported at these fires,” he said. “You can’t really bottle that and put it in a lab.”

Calls for Revenge at Iran Funeral For Hamas Chief Haniyeh