Could Iranians Have Been Involved in Haniyeh’s Killing?

The assassination of the Hamas political leader points to public dissatisfaction with the regime in Tehran.

By Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a research fellow at Macquarie University’s Department of Security Studies and Criminology and the author of The Uncaged Sky: My 804 Days in an Iranian Prison. Foreign Policy

It’s not surprising that Israel would have caught up with Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s top political leader, who was assassinated in an airstrike in Tehran on Wednesday. It had tried to kill him before, and following the shocking atrocities of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks, the Israelis made clear that the group’s leadership were “dead men walking.”

Since then, the gloves have come off in Israel’s shadow war with Iran, which it calls the “head of the snake” of a network of terrorist proxies that include Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and smaller militias operating in Iraq and Syria. As the devastating war in Gaza rages on with no end in sight, Israel has set about picking off senior commanders of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps one by one.

Iran’s unprecedented direct attack on Israel on April 13—which saw Israel’s allies scramble to bolster the country’s air defenses against more than 300 drones and cruise and ballistic missiles—was a response to the assassination of an IRGC commander in Syria and was designed to restore Iran’s deterrence. If Israel did carry out the high-stakes, high-risk assassination of Hamas’s most recognizable leader in the heart of the Iranian capital, such measures have clearly failed.

Haniyeh’s death will have little practical impact on the ground in Gaza: The leader was principally based in Doha, Qatar, where he was rumored to enjoy a lavish lifestyle while acting as the international face of Hamas. However, his assassination will almost certainly set back the current round of cease-fire talks, further undercutting much-dashed hopes for a hostage release deal and a negotiated end to hostilities. Such an outcome may not be unwelcome for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his partners, whose fragile coalition has long seemed on the verge of collapse.

The assassination is significant not because of who Haniyeh is per se—there will always be others to take his place—but because of its location and timing. Initial reports attributed to Hamas and published in Iranian state media said Israel conducted a predawn airstrike on Haniyeh’s home in Tehran. This would have been outrageous on a normal day, let alone hours after the new Iranian president’s inauguration, when the capital was flooded with senior Iranian officials, foreign dignitaries, IRGC commanders, and an assortment of wanted terrorists.

Iran is known to have sophisticated Russian S-300 air defenses, developed in response to longstanding U.S. and Israeli threats to its covert nuclear program. The last time airstrikes were even rumored in Tehran, the IRGC was so trigger-happy that it shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet, killing all 176 people on board. It is unfathomable that an airstrike originating from outside Iran’s borders could have proceeded undetected on the day of President Masoud Pezeshkian’s inauguration.

As a result, both the timing and the location of Haniyeh’s assassination would be deeply embarrassing to Iran. In addition to sending the message that no one in the country is safe, the Hamas leader’s killing in a protected apartment in downtown Tehran telegraphs something more worrying to the Iranian regime: It was almost certainly an inside job.

One largely unacknowledged facet of the international reaction to the horrors of Oct. 7 and Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza is the growth of grassroots Iranian support for Israel. A surprising number of ordinary Iranians inside the country and within the sizeable diaspora abroad have taken pro-Israel positions both on social media and during demonstrations in Western countries. So many Iranians cheered on Israel’s retaliation for Iran’s April 13 attack that the regime was forced to issue an warning threatening to arrest anyone caught defending Israel or criticizing the IRGC online.

Many people in Iran today are still grappling with the brutal fallout from the unprecedented “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement in 2022, which saw hundreds of thousands of protesters take to the streets nationwide to call for gender equality, freedom, and the downfall of the regime. Just yesterday the singer Shervin Hajipour, who wrote the viral song “Baraye,” which became the anthem of the protests and won a Grammy Award, was summoned to prison to begin a nearly four-year sentence for “propaganda against the establishment” and incitement.

Many Iranians witnessed the scenes in southern Israel on Oct. 7, including footage of Hamas militants killing unarmed civilians, assaulting women, and taking hostages into Gaza, and see the fingerprints of the Iranian regime, which is Hamas’s principal backer. As recently as last year, Iranian authorities were actively shooting protesters in the streets, sexually assaulting female protesters in prison en masse, and sentencing thousands of people to lengthy prison time or even death. The support for Israel inside Iran has grown not because of any deep love for the Jewish state, but instead out of the public’s abhorrence of its own government.

As Haniyeh’s assassination attests, Iran’s brutal authoritarianism now poses a threat to its own internal security. The manner in which the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement was crushed has fueled a new generation of Iranians who might be tempted by cash incentives or promises of residency abroad to collaborate in foreign-inspired plots against their own government. Israel’s April 19 retaliatory strike on a military site in Isfahan province was likely conducted by quadcopter drones launched from inside Iran. It’s possible that the airborne projectile that struck Haniyeh’s apartment had similarly local origins, with such drones easier to launch undetected from inside the country than from beyond Iran’s borders.

In spite of the increasing number of tourists, businesspeople, and other foreign visitors captured in Iran and paraded before the Revolutionary Courts as “spies,” the reality is that many of the assassination plots attributed to Israel are carried out by local Iranian recruits. These include the 2020 killing of the Iran nuclear program’s shadowy mastermind Mohsen Fakhrizadeh by an AI-programmed, remote-controlled machine gun, as well as the targeted killings of at least six nuclear scientists and the deaths of seven officials working on Iran’s missile and drone programs. Blasts at the Natanz nuclear facility, the theft of nuclear documents from a warehouse in Tehran, and the kidnapping and interrogation of multiple IRGC officials inside Iran have all been attributed to local networks operating on behalf of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency.

Haniyeh’s assassination sends a chilling message to those in the Iranian regime, not only about the skill and penetration of Israel’s intelligence capabilities, but also about the extent to which many of their own compatriots are willing to risk imprisonment, torture, and even execution to aid their country’s enemies. The recent attempt to resuscitate the long-moribund reformist wing in Iran through the newly elected Pezeshkian may in part amount to a recognition by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei that the brutal repression of recent years has been counterproductive for national security.

However, as long as Iran’s Islamic Republic remains so profoundly lacking in popular legitimacy, Israel will likely continue to boldly exploit widespread dissatisfaction among the Iranian people to its own ends.