Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran, Iran, on July 31, the Palestinian militant group said. According to Iranian state media, Haniyeh and one of his bodyguards were killed in a strike on the building they were staying in.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said that Haniyeh was in Tehran to attend the inauguration ceremony of Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian when the incident occurred.

Hamas released a statement condemning the attack and saying Haniyeh was killed in “a treacherous Zionist raid on his residence in Tehran”. This allegation has not been confirmed by Iranian authorities. 

Here are some facts about the Hamas leader:

1. Ismail Haniyeh was born on January 29, 1962, in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza City, Gaza Strip. His family, Palestinian refugees, fled their home near the present-day Israeli town of Ashkelon during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. He studied Arabic literature at the Islamic University of Gaza, graduating in 1987. 

2. Haniyeh’s involvement in politics began in the 1980s as a student leader at the Islamic University. He was a key figure in the founding of Hamas in 1987 and became a close advisor to Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. After Yassin’s assassination in 2004, Haniyeh became the deputy chief of Hamas’s political bureau. In 2017, he succeeded Khaled Mashal as the political chief of Hamas.

3. In 1988, he was arrested by Israeli authorities for joining the First Intifada, a mass uprising against Israeli occupation that began in 1987 and lasted until 1993. He spent six months in jail and was arrested again in 1989. In 1992, he was deported to south Lebanon along with 400 other Islamists.

4. Haniyeh became the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority in 2006, a position he held until 2007. During this time, Hamas secured a surprising majority in the 2006 Palestinian legislative council elections. However, internal strife with rival Fatah led to the disbandment of the government and the formation of an independent Hamas-led administration in the Gaza Strip, which Haniyeh led from 2007 to 2014. 

5. Ismail Haniyeh was married and was father to five children. His three sons, Hazem, Amir and Mohammad, were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on April 10, 2024. 

Israel vowed to kill Ismail Haniyeh and destroy Hamas after the October 7 attack that killed 1,195 people. Since then, Israel’s war on Gaza has killed 39,400 people and caused injuries to 90,923 others, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.