Hamas says leader killed in Israel strike in Iran

Hamas says leader killed in Israel strike in Iran
Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated at his residence in Iran. (Iranian foreign ministry/AFP)
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Updated 31 July 2024
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Hamas says leader killed in Israel strike in Iran

Hamas says leader killed in Israel strike in Iran
  • Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei threatened “harsh punishment” for Haniyeh’s killing
  • Netanyahu avoided directly mentioning Haniyeh but said Israel had “delivered crushing blows to all our enemies” in recent days

TEHRAN: Hamas said Wednesday its political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in an Israeli strike in Iran, where he was attending the swearing-in of the new president, and vowed the act “will not go unanswered.”
Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei too threatened “harsh punishment” for Haniyeh’s killing, saying: “We consider it our duty to seek revenge for his blood as he was martyred in the territory of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Iran’s new President Masoud Pezeshkian echoed him, saying: “The Zionists will soon see the consequences of their cowardly and terrorist act.” Israeli policies “have reached a dead end,” he added.
Israel declined to comment on the Tehran strike, which came after it struck a Hezbollah stronghold in south Beirut on Tuesday, killing a senior commander of the Lebanese militant group it blamed for a deadly weekend rocket strike on the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights.
Speaking in a televised address on Wednesday evening, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu avoided directly mentioning Haniyeh but said Israel had “delivered crushing blows to all our enemies” in recent days.
The UN Security Council was preparing on Wednesday to hold an emergency meeting, requested by Iran and supported by others including China and Russia, following Haniyeh’s killing.
In a letter to the Security Council, Iran’s UN envoy Amir Saeid Iravani called on members to “condemn unequivocally” Israeli actions, and urged it to “ensure accountability” including potential sanctions.
Qatar, which has been spearheading efforts with Egypt and the United States to broker a ceasefire in Gaza, said the killing of Haniyeh, Hamas’s lead negotiator, threw the whole process into doubt.
“Brother leader, mujahid Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the movement, died in a Zionist strike on his residence in Tehran after he participated in the inauguration of the new (Iranian) president,” the Palestinian militant group said in a statement.
Hamas political bureau member Musa Abu Marzuk, who analysts say could succeed Haniyeh, vowed the group would retaliate. “The assassination of leader Ismail Haniyeh is a cowardly act and will not go unanswered,” he said.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards also announced the death, saying Haniyeh’s residence in Tehran was hit and he was killed along with a bodyguard.
Iranian media said the 2:00 am (2230 GMT) strike targeted “the special residences for war veterans in north Tehran” where Haniyeh was staying.
Haniyeh had traveled to Tehran to attend Tuesday’s swearing-in of Pezeshkian.
The government, following the news of the killing, declared three days of national mourning.
An “official and public” funeral ceremony for Haniyeh will be held in Tehran on Thursday before his body is flown to Qatar, his base in recent years, for burial on Friday, Hamas said.
Hundreds of demonstrators waving Palestinian flags rallied Wednesday in Tehran’s Palestine Square, chanting “Death to Israel, Death to America!,” AFP correspondents said.
There were also protests in Amman, where thousands of Jordanians gathered outside the Israeli embassy to protest the death of the Hamas leader, and in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas condemned Haniyeh’s killing as a “cowardly act.” Palestinian factions in the Israeli-occupied West Bank called for a general strike and protest marches across the territory.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the strikes on Tehran and southern Beirut represented a “dangerous escalation.”
All efforts, he said, should be “leading to a ceasefire” in Gaza, and the release of hostages taken there from Israel.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken also said Wednesday that a ceasefire in Gaza was still the “imperative.”
Later, the White House said the twin killings “don’t help” regional tensions. “We’re obviously concerned about escalation,” said National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, although he added that Washington saw “no signs that an escalation is imminent.”
Netanyahu has vowed to destroy Hamas in retaliation for its October 7 attacks on Israel, which sparked the war in Gaza.
The attacks 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, which does not provide details on civilian and militant deaths.
Regional tensions have soared during the war, drawing in Iran-backed militant groups in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen.
Qatar’s prime minister, who has spearheaded efforts to broker a truce and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas, said Haniyeh’s killing threw 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 asked in a post on social media site X.
“Peace needs serious partners.”
Egyptian, Qatari and US mediators had met with Israeli negotiators in Rome on Sunday in their efforts at a deal.
Concern grew among Israelis over the fate of the dozens of hostages still held captive in Gaza.
Haniyeh’s killing “was a mistake as it threatens the possibility of having a hostage deal,” said Anat Noy, a resident of the coastal city of Haifa.

The Tehran strike which killed Haniyeh came hours after Israel said it had killed senior Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr in a strike on the group’s stronghold in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Hezbollah said Wednesday that Shukr was inside the building hit by Israel. His body was later found under the rubble.
The Israeli military said its Tuesday strike had “eliminated” Shukr, a top Hezbollah commander it blamed for carrying out a weekend rocket attack on the annexed Golan Heights that killed 12 children in a Druze Arab town.


Eight-year-old found dead in Turkiye after national search effort

Eight-year-old found dead in Turkiye after national search effort
Updated 7 sec ago
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Eight-year-old found dead in Turkiye after national search effort

Eight-year-old found dead in Turkiye after national search effort
ANKARA: The body of an eight-year-old girl who had been missing in Turkiye for 19 days has been found after an enormous manhunt, the interior minister said on Sunday.
The body of Narin Guran was found in a bag in a river in the southeastern province of Diyarbakir, around one kilometer from the village where she lived with her family, Diyarbakir governor Murat Zorluoglu told reporters.
“Unfortunately, the lifeless body of Narin, who went missing in the village of Tavsantepe... has been found,” Turkish interior minister Ali Yerlikaya wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
She disappeared on August 21, sparking a huge search effort in Turkiye, with a number of well-known figures joining a social media campaign called “Find Narin.”
“Narin Guran was found dead wearing the same clothes as the last time she was seen,” said Zorluoglu.
“Based on the first observations, she was put into a bag after she was killed. The bag was then placed in the river, hidden under branches and rocks so as not to raise suspicion,” he added.
Diyarbakir prosecutors have detained 21 people, said Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunc.
The girl’s uncle was arrested last week on suspicion of murder and “deprivation of liberty.”
“Our president Recep Tayyip Erdogan is following the case closely to guarantee that the ongoing investigation continues thoroughly and that those who took Narin’s life answer before the law,” the president’s communications director Fahrettin Altun said on X.
Turkiye’s pro-Kurdish party DEM has called for a march to take place in Diyarbakir on Sunday evening.
“Narin was killed in an organized manner. Those responsible for this murder, which has saddened us all, must be revealed and held accountable before an impartial and independent justice system,” DEM wrote on X.
Tunc said on X that “those responsible for Narin’s death will be brought to justice.”

Sudan rejects UN call for ‘impartial’ force to protect civilians

Sudan rejects UN call for ‘impartial’ force to protect civilians
Updated 08 September 2024
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Sudan rejects UN call for ‘impartial’ force to protect civilians

Sudan rejects UN call for ‘impartial’ force to protect civilians

PORT SUDAN: Sudan has rejected a call by UN experts for the deployment of an “independent and impartial force” to protect millions of civilians driven from their homes by more than a year of war.
The conflict since April last year, pitting the army against paramilitary forces, has killed tens of thousands of people and triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
The independent UN experts said Friday their fact-finding mission had uncovered “harrowing” violations by both sides, “which may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
They called for “an independent and impartial force with a mandate to safeguard civilians” to be deployed “without delay.”
The Sudanese foreign ministry, which is loyal to the army under General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, said in a statement late Saturday that “the Sudanese government rejects in their entirety the recommendations of the UN mission.”
It called the UN Human Rights Council, which created the fact-finding mission last year, “a political and illegal body,” and the panel’s recommendations “a flagrant violation of their mandate.”
The UN experts said eight million civilians have been displaced and another two million people have fled to neighboring countries.
More than 25 million people — upwards of half the country’s population — face acute food shortages.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, on a visit to Sudan on Sunday, said: “The scale of the emergency is shocking, as is the insufficient action being taken to curtail the conflict and respond to the suffering it is causing.”
In Port Sudan, where government offices and the United Nations have relocated to due to the intense fighting in the capital Khartoum, Tedros called on the “world to wake up and help Sudan out of the nightmare it is living through.”
The Sudanese foreign ministry statement accused the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, led by Burhan’s former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, of “systematically targeting civilians and civilian institutions.”
“The protection of civilians remains an absolute priority for the Sudanese government,” it said.
The statement added that the UN Human Rights Council’s role should be “to support the national process, rather than seek to impose a different exterior mechanism.”
It also rejected the experts’ call for an arms embargo.


Iran’s president to visit Iraq on first foreign trip

Iran’s president to visit Iraq on first foreign trip
Updated 08 September 2024
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Iran’s president to visit Iraq on first foreign trip

Iran’s president to visit Iraq on first foreign trip
  • Pezeshkian will head a high-ranking Iranians delegation to Baghdad to meet senior Iraqi officials

TEHRAN: Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian will visit neighboring Iraq on Wednesday, state media reported Sunday, in what will be his first trip abroad since he took office in July.
Pezeshkian will head a high-ranking Iranians delegation to Baghdad to meet senior Iraqi officials.
The visit comes at the invitation of Iraq’s premier, Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani, the official IRNA news agency quoted Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad Mohammad Kazem Al-Sadegh as saying.
The two countries will sign memoranda of understanding on cooperation and security, Sadegh said, without elaborating.
He said the agreements were to have been signed during a planned visit to Iraq by Iran’s late president, Ebrahim Raisi.
But Raisi was killed in May along with the then foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, when their helicopter crashed on a fog-shrouded mountainside in northern Iran.
Since taking office, Pezeshkian has vowed to “prioritize” strengthening ties with the Islamic republic’s neighbors.
Relations between Iran and Iraq, both Shiite-majority countries, have grown closer over the past two decades.
Tehran is one of Iraq’s leading trade partners, and wields considerable political influence in Baghdad where its Iraqi allies dominate parliament and the current government.
In March 2023 the two countries signed a security agreement covering their common border, months after Tehran struck Kurdish opposition groups in Iraq’s north.
They have since agreed to disarm Iranian Kurdish rebel groups and remove them from border areas.
Tehran accuses the groups of importing arms from Iraq and of fomenting 2022 protests that erupted after the death in custody of Iranian-Kurd woman Mahsa Amini.
In January, Iran launched a deadly strike in northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, saying it had targeted a site used by “spies of the Zionist regime (Mossad).”
On Saturday, an exiled Iranian Kurdish group said one of its activists, Behzad Khosrawi, had been arrested in Iraq’s northern city of Sulaimaniyah and handed over to “Iranian intelligence.”
Local Asayesh security forces said Khosrawi was arrested “because he did not have residency” in the Kurdish region, and denied he had any connection to “political activism.”


Algerian candidate Hassani Cherif’s campaign says it recorded election violations

Algerian candidate Hassani Cherif’s campaign says it recorded election violations
Updated 08 September 2024
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Algerian candidate Hassani Cherif’s campaign says it recorded election violations

Algerian candidate Hassani Cherif’s campaign says it recorded election violations

ALGIERS: Algerian presidential candidate Abdelaali Hassani Cherif’s campaign said in a statement on Sunday that it had recorded cases of violations in the country’s Saturday presidential election, initial results of which have yet to be announced.
The campaign said the violations included putting pressure on some polling station officials to inflate the results, failure to deliver vote-sorting records to the candidates’ representatives, and instances of proxy group voting.
Algerians voted on Saturday in an election in which military-backed President Abdulmadjid Tebboune is widely expected to win a second term.


Israeli medics say 3 people were shot and killed at the West Bank-Jordan border crossing

Israeli medics say 3 people were shot and killed at the West Bank-Jordan border crossing
Updated 08 September 2024
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Israeli medics say 3 people were shot and killed at the West Bank-Jordan border crossing

Israeli medics say 3 people were shot and killed at the West Bank-Jordan border crossing
  • Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service confirmed the toll
  • Israeli police say ‘shooter’ killed, without providing further details

JERUSALEM: Three people have been shot and killed near the border crossing between the West Bank and Jordan, Israeli first responders said Sunday.

Israeli police said the shooter was killed, without providing further details. The border crossing is used by Palestinians, Israelis and international tourists. Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service was at the scene and confirmed the toll.

The Israeli-occupied West Bank has seen a surge of violence since Hamas' Oct. 7 attack out of Gaza triggered the war there. Israel has launched near-daily military arrest raids into dense Palestinian residential areas, and there has also been a rise in settler violence and Palestinian attacks on Israelis.