Iran planned to hold a funeral Thursday for Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh whose killing in Tehran has added to fears of a regional conflict Han
Iran planned to hold a funeral Thursday for Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, whose killing in Tehran has added to fears of a regional conflict.
Haniyeh was in Tehran for the swearing-in of Iran’s new president, and the militant group said he will be buried Friday in Qatar where he was based.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned Wednesday that Haniyeh’s assassination and Israel’s killing of a Hezbollah commander in Beirut ‘represent a dangerous escalation’ of tensions in the Middle East.
Guterres said in a statement that at a time when ‘all efforts’ should be focused on reaching a cease-fire in the nearly 10-month Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and increasing humanitarian aid to famished Palestinians, instead ‘what we are seeing are efforts to undermine these goals.’
Guterres called for ‘maximum restraint by all’ but acknowledged ‘that restraint alone is insufficient at this extremely sensitive time.’
‘The international community must work together to urgently prevent any actions that could push the entire Middle East over the edge, with a devastating impact on civilians’, Guterres said.
Israel on Tuesday evening killed a top Hezbollah commander, Fouad Shukur, in an airstrike in Beirut. Israel said Shukur was responsible for a July 27 attack that killed 12 children and teenagers in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.
The Israeli military, while announcing the attack on Tuesday that killed Shukur, made no comment about the predawn airstrike Wednesday in the Iranian capital.
In a subsequent statement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Jewish state ‘will exact a heavy price from any aggression against us on any front’ but did not mention the assassination of Haniyeh.
Ilan Berman, senior vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council, told VOA that it is clear Israel was responsible for Haniyeh’s killing, and that it is part of an Israeli strategy to respond to its own failures in the October 7 attack, including a lack of deterrence against Hamas.
‘It was very clear that if that was left unaddressed, other actors like Hezbollah could get similar ideas’, Berman said. ‘So, everything that Israel has done since, both in terms of the Gaza war, but also long-range strikes on the Houthis in Yemen, attacks in Syria, attacks in Lebanon, and now the elimination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, is intended as part of a long-term strategy to rebuild Israeli deterrence.
