Hamas honcho Ismail Haniyeh was blown up by bomb smuggled into his Tehran guesthouse months ago
Top Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated Wednesday by a bomb that was smuggled into the Tehran guesthouse where he was staying two months before his arrival, according to a report.
Haniyeh, who was initially thought to have been killed in an airstrike, died from a remotely detonated bomb inside the guesthouse, seven Middle Eastern officials, including two Iranians and an American official, told the New York Times.
The bomb was hidden inside the guesthouse approximately two months before Haniyeh’s visit, five of the Middle Eastern officials told the Times.
According to the sources, the bomb detonated remotely once it was confirmed Haniyeh was inside the room at around 2 a.m. local time.
The explosion was so targeted that the room where the leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ziyad al-Nakhalah, next door sustained little damage, Iranian officials told The Times.
The officials likened the attack’s precision to the killing of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was assassinated by Israel using a remote controlled machine gun in 2020
The explosion also killed a bodyguard, according to the report.
The guesthouse Haniyeh was staying at is run and protected by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Neshat, a wealthy neighborhood of northern Tehran.
IRGC members briefed on the incident said the explosion shook the entire building, shattering windows and causing part of an exterior wall to collapse.
The IRGC-affiliated Sabereen News posted photos of the burned-out building, which were later verified by western outlets, showing an entire corner of the complex covered in black ash with debris scattered below.
Who was Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader killed?
Ismail Haniyeh, one of the most senior Hamas officials, was killed by a bomb that was smuggled into the Tehran guesthouse where he was staying.
Haniyeh was in Tehran to attend the inauguration ceremony of Iran’s new president.
Born in the then-Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip in 1963, Haniyeh had been a prominent member of Hamas since the 1980s and, in 1989, spent three years imprisoned by Israel during the first Palestinian uprising.
Upon his return to Gaza in 1997 after spending years in exile with other Hamas leaders, Haniyeh was appointed leader and president of the political bureau of Hamas, solidifying his influence and power within the organization.
In 2006, President Mahmoud Abbas appointed Haniyeh as Palestinian prime minister after Hamas won the most seats in national elections. He was then elected head of Hamas’ political bureau in 2017 and was widely considered Hamas’ overall leader until his death.
Before the killing, Israel vowed to eliminate Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders following the terror group’s Oct. 7 attack on the Jewish state in which 1,200 people were killed.
An Israeli airstrike killed three of Haniyeh’s sons and four of his grandchildren, who were traveling in a car through Gaza’s Shati refugee camp to visit family on the first day of the Muslim holiday Eid-al-Fitr in April 2024.
With the revelation that Haniyeh was killed by a remotely detonated bomb, not by an airstrike or drone strike as previously speculated, Iranian officials slammed the assassination as a major security failure.
The guesthouse that Haniyeh was staying at is part of a compound reserved for retreats, secret meetings and housing prominent guests, Iranian sources told the Times.
It remains unclear how the bomb made its way to the guesthouse, but Iranian officials said the explosion is now a source of tremendous embarrassment for the IRGC.
While Tehran and Hamas have blamed Israel for the assassination, the Jewish state has remained silent on the matter, which is typically the case when it operates on Iranian soil.
Israel has been accused of carrying out several assassinations in Iran throughout the decades, including that of Massaoud Ali-Mohammadi, another nuclear scientist who was blown up by a remotely detonated bomb hooked up to a motorcycle outside his apartment in 2010.
Majid Shahriari, another nuclear scientist from the University of Tehran, was killed in a similar fashion just ten months later.
