Tehran blast: How did Hamas leader die?

Top Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated Wednesday by a bomb that was smuggled into the Tehran guesthouse where he was staying two months before his arrival, according to a report.

Haniyeh, who was initially believed to have been killed in an airstrike, died from a remotely detonated bomb inside the guest house, seven Middle Eastern officials, including two Iranians and an American official, told The New York Times.

The bomb was hidden inside the guest house about two months before Haniyeh’s visit, five Middle Eastern officials told the Times.

According to the sources, the bomb was detonated remotely once it was confirmed that Haniyeh was inside the room at around 2 a.m. local time.

The blast was so targeted that the room next door, where Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Ziyad al-Nakhalah was staying, suffered little damage, Iranian officials told The Times.

Authorities compared the precision of the strike to the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was assassinated by Israel using a remotely controlled machine gun in 2020.

Who was Ismail Haniyeh, the slain Hamas leader?

Ismail Haniyeh, one of Hamas’s most senior officials, was killed in Iran by an alleged Israeli airstrike on his Tehran residence on July 31, according to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

Haniyeh was in Tehran to attend the inauguration ceremony of Iran’s new president.

Born in the then Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip in 1963, Haniyeh was a prominent member of Hamas since the 1980s and in 1989 spent three years in prison by Israel during the first Palestinian uprising.

Upon returning to Gaza in 1997 after spending years in exile with other Hamas leaders, Haniyeh was named leader and chairman of the Hamas political bureau, solidifying his influence and power within the organization.

In 2006, President Mahmoud Abbas appointed Haniyeh as Palestinian prime minister after Hamas won a majority of seats in national elections. He was then elected head of Hamas’s political bureau in 2017 and was widely considered the overall leader of Hamas until his death.

Before the assassination, Israel had vowed to eliminate Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders following the terror group’s attack on the Jewish state on October 7, in which 1,200 people were killed.

An Israeli airstrike killed Haniyeh’s three children and four grandchildren as they traveled by car through the Shati refugee camp in Gaza to visit family on the first day of the Muslim holiday Eid-al-Fitr in April 2024.

The blast that killed Haniyeh also killed a bodyguard, according to the report.

According to the sources, the bomb detonated remotely when it was confirmed that Haniyeh was inside the room.

The blast also killed a bodyguard, according to the report.

The guesthouse where Haniyeh was staying is run and protected by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Neshat, a wealthy neighborhood in northern Tehran.

IRGC officials briefed on the incident said the explosion shook the entire building, shattering windows and causing part of an outer wall to collapse.

IRGC-affiliated Sabereen News published photos of the burned-out building, which were later verified by Western media outlets, showing an entire corner of the complex covered in black ash with debris scattered below.

With the revelation that Haniyeh was killed by a remotely detonated bomb, not an air or drone strike as previously speculated, Iranian officials have criticized the assassination as a major security failure.

The guesthouse where Haniyeh was staying is part of a complex reserved for retreats, secret meetings and hosting important guests, Iranian sources told the Times.

It is not yet clear how the bomb reached the guest house, but Iranian officials said the blast is now a source of enormous embarrassment for the IRGC.

While Tehran and Hamas have blamed Israel for the assassination, the Jewish state has remained silent on the matter, as is typically the case when it operates on Iranian soil.

Israel has been accused of carrying out several assassinations in Iran over the decades, including that of Massaoud Ali-Mohammadi, another nuclear scientist who was blown up by a remotely detonated bomb attached to a motorcycle outside his apartment in 2010.

Majid Shahriari, another nuclear scientist at the University of Tehran, was killed in a similar manner just ten months later.