Will Ismail Haniyeh's Assassination Trigger a War Involving Hezbollah and Iran?

Hamas members hold a portrait of Haniyeh during a protest to condemn his killing at al-Bass Palestinian refugee camp in the southern port city of Tyre, Lebanon.

[Photo: Mohammed Zaatari/AP Photo]

Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’ political wing, who has been residing in Qatar since 2019, was assassinated earlier this week in an airstrike by Israel at a house in Tehran. He was in the Iranian capital to attend the inauguration of the new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. He was killed hours after he met Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and is the senior-most Hamas leader to be killed since the Gaza War began following the 7 October terror attack on Israel.

Haniyeh was in charge of Hamas’ international relations and was playing a key role in the hostage negotiations and ceasefire talks, which included indirect contacts with Egypt, Qatar, the United States, and even Israel. Besides, he maintained ties with other Palestinian groups and friendly governments in the region as well like Iran, Qatar, and Turkiye. In this sense, he was the international face of Hamas.

Just hours before the attack on Haniyeh, Israel carried out another air strike in Lebanon's capital Beirut and killed a top Hezbollah commander named Fuad Shukr, as revenge for the earlier rocket attack that led to 12 young people being killed in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

In April, Haniyeh lost more than ten members of his own family when the Israelis attacked a vehicle in Gaza, killing his sister, three sons and several grandchildren.

There are concerns around the world that this action could trigger an intensified war involving Hezbollah and Iran, but that is unlikely at present.

With the strong support of the United States, Israel has maintained dominance in the current crisis, marked by its successful defence of the massive Iranian air and missile attack in April 2024. The assassination of Haniyeh, at what must have been in an Islamic Revolutionary Guards guest house in Tehran, cannot but have been another embarrassing signal to the Iranians of Israel's ability to do whatever it wants.

Iran is likely to retaliate, but its options are limited. Neither Iran nor the Hezbollah are keen on a wider war, but, of course, the possibility of inadvertent escalation is always there.

A Brief Profile of Ismail Haniyeh

Haniyeh was born in 1962 at the Shati camp in Gaza, near the place where he lost members of his family in April. His parents moved there in 1948 after being displaced from their home in what is now the Israeli city of Ashkelon.

He has been active as a member of Hamas since its founding in 1988 and his career within the organisation was encouraged by the founder of the outfit, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was assassinated in 2004 by the Israelis. Haniyeh himself survived an assassination attempt a year earlier.

He has done time in Israeli prisons in the 1980s and the 1990s, and moved to Qatar in 2019 to head Hamas' political office there. His successor is Yahya Shinwar, arguably the most important current Israeli target in Gaza and the person who planned the 7 October strike on Israel.

Haniyeh used to be the prime minister of Palestine, appointed in 2006, but was dismissed a year later over a schism with the rival Palestinian Authority. He was elected as the head of the Hamas Politburo in 2017 and declared a designated terrorist by the US in 2018.

Why Now? What Will it Change?

There is a great deal of speculation about why the assassination took place at this time. In Karan Thapar's show, a leading Indian expert on the Middle East, Ambassador Talmiz Ahmed, has argued that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the strike to derail the current peace talks that the US has been pushing.

There is a simple correlation between peace and Netanyahu’s continuance in office, ie, it is likely that he would be forced to leave office the second there is peace, and therefore, has a vested interest in prolonging the hostilities.

That being said, the chance that the assassination of a terrorist leader will change things is far-fetched. Hamas has lost several top leaders to assassinations, including its founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Besides Haniyeh, there is Mohammed Deif (Israel is claiming that he is dead too), Marwan Isa, Saleh Aurori, as well as a number of other figures. They are all products of the refugee camps of Gaza, comprising of people displaced by Israel.

As long as they continue to drink the bitter water from the wells of their grievances, assassination will not change anything.

Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld once said that there were two ways you could fight an insurgency. You could adopt a sledgehammer approach like Hafiz Assad who crushed the Muslim Brotherhood uprising in the city of Hama in Syria in 1982. Assad simply levelled the city with artillery and tanks, killing tens of thousands of people.

The second way is how the British dealt with the Irish Republican Army insurgency that began in the late 1960s which had carried out a massive terror campaign in Northern Ireland and in the UK, assassinating Lord Mountbatten and nearly Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. After initial glitches, the British adopted the tactic of “extreme self-control” and fought the insurgency through the rule of war and finally overcame it.

The Israelis could well be following Assad’s tactics in bombing Gaza to rubble and not giving a damn about civilian casualties that occur when they target Hamas leaders.

When Mohammed Deif was killed, as many as 71 non-combatants also died in the operation. That Gaza is hell on earth today can hardly be doubted, but Israel too is deeply divided, as evidenced by the recent right-wing attacks on its military bases on account of action taken against some soldiers for excesses.

Netanyahu probably does not care a whit about the consequences of his policy making which is based on his political survival. Haniyeh’s execution could be just one more move on the Middle Eastern chessboard which seems to be on the course of Armageddon.

(The writer is a Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. This is an opinion article and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)