TEHERAN (TIP): Iran held a funeral ceremony on August 1 with calls for revenge after the killing in Tehran of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in a strike blamed on Israel.
Thousands of mourners paid respects to Haniyeh as the Israeli military confirmed that an air strike in Gaza last month killed the Hamas military chief, Mohammed Deif.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei led prayers for Haniyeh ahead of his burial in Qatar, having earlier threatened a “harsh punishment” for his killing.
In Tehran’s city center, crowds, including women shrouded in black, carried posters of Haniyeh and Palestinian flags in a procession and ceremony that began at Tehran University.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards announced the day before that Haniyeh and a bodyguard were killed in a pre-dawn strike on Wednesday, July 31, on their accommodation in Tehran.
It came just hours after Israel killed a top Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr, in a retaliatory strike in the south of Lebanon’s capital Beirut, raising fears of a wider regional conflict as the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza continues.
Senior Iranian officials including President Masoud Pezeshkian and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps chief, General Hossein Salami, attended the ceremony for Haniyeh, state TV showed. Qatar-based Haniyeh had been visiting Tehran for Mr. Pezeshkian’s inauguration ceremony on Tuesday. Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas’s foreign relations chief, vowed during the funeral ceremony that Haniyeh’s message will live on and “we will pursue Israel until it is uprooted from the land of Palestine”.
Mr. Pezeshkian later told Mr. Hayya that Iran “will continue to support with firmer determination on the Axis of Resistance”, Iran-aligned regional groups that include Hamas, the official IRNA news agency said.
Iran’s parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said, “It is our duty to respond at the right time and in the right place.” 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.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken also said Wednesday, March 31, that a ceasefire in Gaza was still the “imperative”, with White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby later adding that the twin killings “don’t help” regional tensions.
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 Huthi rebels, “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.
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan, meanwhile, spoke by phone after the attack with his acting Iranian counterpart Ali Bagheri to discuss “the latest developments in the region”.
The UN Security Council also convened an emergency meeting Wednesday, March 31 at Iran’s request to discuss the strike, with Tehran’s envoy Amir Saeid Iravani urging members to take “immediate action to ensure accountability for these violations of international law”.
Hamas has for months been indirectly negotiating a truce and hostage-prisoner exchange deal with Israel, with Egypt, Qatar and the United States facilitating the talks.
Analysts told AFP that Haniyeh was a moderating influence within the Islamist group, and that while he would be replaced, the dynamics within Hamas 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.
Israel’s retaliatory campaign against Hamas has killed at least 39,445 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
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.
(Source: AFP)