Israel’s defense minister acknowledged on Monday for the first time that the country was responsible for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, Iran, on July 31, 2024.
Israel was widely believed to be behind his assassination but had not confirmed its culpability until Defense Minister Israel Katz alluded to it while speaking at a commemoration event for local security officers.
“We will strike [the Houthis’] strategic infrastructure and decapitate its leaders. Just as we did to Haniyeh, [Yahya] Sinwar, and [Hassan] Nasrallah in Tehran, Gaza, and Lebanon — we will do in Hodeidah and Sanaa,” Katz said, referring to the slain leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah.
Haniyeh was the leader of Hamas’s political operation and was based in Qatar, not Gaza. He traveled to Iran for the presidential inauguration of Masoud Pezeshkian and was killed when a bomb was detonated remotely in the heavily guarded guesthouse that is run and protected by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
The bomb had been planted well in advance with the intelligence of where Haniyeh would stay when in Tehran, according to the New York Times.
Israel and Iran have engaged in shadowy espionage for years, but Tehran’s proxy forces have directly attacked Israel over the last year and a half, prompting Israel to assume a war footing, and they have sought to fundamentally shift the power in the region.
Haniyeh’s assassination was one of several significant Israeli military and intelligence operations in the roughly 14 months since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack put the entire region on the brink of a massive conflict. Hamas killed about 1,200 people on that day and kidnapped about 250 others, about 100 of whom they still hold. The next day, Hezbollah began firing cross-border projectiles into northern Israel, raising concerns of a similar cross-border raid like the one Hamas conducted.
Israel primarily focused on dismantling Hamas during the months after the Oct. 7 attack. They invaded Gaza weeks after the attack and are still fighting Hamas in Gaza despite having killed most of the group’s senior leaders and devastated the group’s ranks. Their war efforts have led to the killing of more than 45,000 people, and Israeli officials acknowledge that about half of that total are civilians. Much of the infrastructure of the strip has been demolished. Several humanitarian organizations have accused Israel of committing genocide, a charge that both Israel and the United States strongly dispute.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) turned its attention to Hezbollah in September, in particular with the activation of a plan 10 years in the making. Israel’s Mossad agency created walkie-talkies and pagers with a secret and tiny amount of explosive material, convinced Hezbollah to purchase them from a fake company, and then, in September, they finally detonated the devices.
“When they are buying from us, they have zero clue that they are buying from the Mossad,” a retired Mossad agent told CBS’s 60 Minutes. “We make like Truman Show, everything is controlled by us behind the scenes. In their experience, everything is normal. Everything was 100% kosher including businessman, marketing, engineers, showroom, everything.”
On September 17, Israel detonated the pagers Hezbollah fighters had been using, causing them to suddenly explode, injuring or killing those holding them. The group then resorted to communicating with the walkie-talkies, which also exploded en masse the next day.
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Mossad began weaponizing the walkie-talkies ten years ago, according to a second retired Mossad agent, who said there was an explosive device inside the battery. Mossad found out in 2022 that Hezbollah began buying pagers from a Taiwanese company called Gold Apollo, and Mossad then secretly partnered up with the company to build the bomb-laden beepers.
“We want them to feel vulnerable, which they are,” the second retired Mossad agent added. “We can’t use the pagers again because we already did that. We’ve already moved on to the next thing. And they’ll have to keep on trying to guess what the next thing is.”
Israel also carried out ground operations in southern Lebanon to push Hezbollah further north. Both sides agreed to a ceasefire that commenced in late November.
Israel and the Houthis, which are Iranian-backed Yemeni-based rebels, have also engaged in airstrikes. The two sides have ramped up attacks in recent weeks, prompting Katz’s remarks.