Without officially claiming it, Israel has inflicted a real humiliation on Iran, its number one enemy. Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas’ political bureau, was very high on the list of Hamas leaders to be eliminated after the massacres committed by this Islamist movement on October 7 in southern Israel. He was killed on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday in the heart of Tehran in an apartment in a housing complex controlled by the Revolutionary Guards, the backbone of the Islamic Republic.
The missile was apparently fired outside Iranian airspace. Ziad Nakhale, the leader of Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian organization even more radical than Hamas, who was staying in the same building on a different floor as Ismail Haniyeh at the time of the attack, escaped unharmed.
Hard blow
The operation is a very hard blow from a political and military point of view for the Iranian regime. Ismail Haniyeh was, in fact, an official guest for the swearing-in before the parliament of the new Iranian president Massoud Pezeshkian. Beforehand, he had been entitled to a meeting with the Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei. He was killed just after Fouad Chokr, a Hezbollah official eliminated the previous evening in Beirut by an Israeli missile. He was the military advisor to Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Shiite militia.
Aggravating circumstance: Iranian air defenses again failed to intercept the missile. Already in April, a drone attack attributed to Israel had caused damage to a radar station responsible for protecting nuclear installations in the Isfahan region. This raid was launched in response to the firing of 350 Iranian missiles and drones towards Israeli territory, while 99% of these devices had been destroyed in flight by Israeli air defenses and ships of the American, British and French fleets.
The persuit
For a commentator on Galatz, the Israeli army radio, the two liquidation operations carried out within a few hours of each other against leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations supported by Iran, allow the restoration of the “power of deterrence” of the Hebrew state, seriously undermined following the invasion of 3,000 Hamas commandos on October 7, which took the IDF completely by surprise. Israel has still not eliminated Yahya Sinwar, however. The real leader of Hamas has so far managed to escape Israeli pursuit, even though he has been hiding for 300 days in tunnels in the Gaza Strip.
It remains to be seen what price the Hebrew state could pay at the hands of Iran and Hezbollah. For the moment, the Israeli army, placed on heightened alert, particularly with regard to air defense, has not given the civilian population any new security instructions. But the inhabitants of northern Israel near the Lebanese border, particularly in Haifa, the country’s largest port, are living under very high tension. Protective measures for installations such as refineries, power plants, and arms companies have been strengthened, as have hospital preparations to accommodate any wounded.
Silence in the ranks
In order not to drive the point home too far and to avoid, as much as possible, providing a pretext for starting a regional war in Lebanon and with Iran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed members of the government to remain silent in their ranks and to refrain from any statement regarding the death of Ismail Haniyeh. These instructions were immediately violated by several ministers, including the Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu, who proclaimed on his X account “the disappearance of this son of death allows the world to be cleansed of this filth.”
For most Israeli military commentators, the reactions of Iran and Hezbollah should not exceed certain limits to avoid a general explosion. On the other hand, the ongoing negotiations on the release of the 114 hostages held by Hamas and a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip are likely to be blocked. As Army Radio points out, Yahyia Sinwar “now finds himself all alone, with his back to the wall, with the only asset being the master of the hostages, from whom he apparently has no interest in parting.”
