What does Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination mean for the wider conflict?

Israel has continued to increase its provocations with its latest attack on the Hamas political bureau leader, Ismail Haniyeh, assassinating him in Iran in a violation of the country’s territorial integrity, and raising the prospects of spreading its war on Gaza into a regional conflict.

Haniyeh, who had been the chairman of Hamas political bureau since 2017 and the prime minister of the Palestinian National Authority between 2006 and 2014, was a widely recognised moderate figure in the resistance group. Haniyeh was also a top Palestinian negotiator in both Qatar and Egypt-led ceasefire talks with Israel. His assassination could delay the ceasefire.

“Since Ismail Haniyeh was internationally negotiating and he was considered, according to many including the BBC, as a moderate leader (while other countries may have a different view of him), we all have to understand that this is not a single incident,” says Muhammad Athar Javed, an independent security and defence analyst, who was a former International Security Program fellow at New America.

Javed believes that Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran could be part of “a larger scheme of a design” which may lead “to integrate all the sub-conventional warfare in different regions” from Lebanon to Yemen, Syria and Iraq, where Iran has anti-Israeli proxies, “impacting internal security of different countries.”

Considering the ongoing Ukraine war and tensions between the US and non-Western states such as China in the Pacific and other regions (Africa, South America), Haniyeh’s assassination might signal “a global appetite for war”, which can be “very detrimental”, particularly, for regional economies in the Middle East, the analyst tells TRT World.

In the Israel-Palestine conflict, there are “so many actors involved with a wide range of motivations, making predictions hazardous,” says Richard Falk, a leading international relations expert. “If a wider war occurs, it will likely be a matter of Israel’s initiative, and possibly reflecting Netanyahu’s personal animus,” Falk tells TRT World.

“If Iran succeeds in inflicting heavy symbolic or substantive damage in executing its revenge attack, Israel may treat such an event as a suitable pretext for launching a wider war that, I believe, it would come to regret,” Falk adds.

Iranian leaders have already signaled to Israel that they will retaliate. “The Islamic Republic of Iran will defend its territorial integrity and honor, and make the terrorist invaders regret their cowardly action,” wrote Masoud Pezekshkian, Iran’s new president, on X. His predecessor Ebrahim Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash in May.

The country’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei also warned that Israel will receive a ‘harsh punishment’ from Iran, which is ‘duty-bound’ to ‘avenge’ the assassination.

‘UN’s territorial integrity concept in danger’

Javed draws attention to the fact that Israel has carried out the assassination “on another country’s land” with which it has tensions on various fronts from the Lebanese group Hezbollah to Syria, and Yemen’s Houthis.

These two states have “multi-party conflicts” not only in Gaza but also in other parts of the Middle East and the ongoing Israeli war on the Palestinian enclave is just making things worse between them, he adds.

“There are so many parties involved, so many foreign lands involved that this territorial integrity or sovereignty concept of the United Nations has diminished,” says Javed. He further states that this sets “a dangerous precedent”, undermining the political base of nation-states.

“If the violation of the sovereignty of other countries become so frequent, this would create a set of sub-nonconventional wars,” which could essentially, at some point, trigger “the big war”, according to the analyst.

“Iran must be embarrassed about what happened because he (Haniyeh) was attending the country’s new president’s oath-taking ceremony,” the analyst says. But he also calls to attention “the vulnerable security situation in Iran”, noting that during Haniyeh’s stay in Qatar, nothing untoward had happened.

Killing a ‘moderate’

By killing Haniyeh, the top Palestinian negotiator, and also targeting a top Hezbollah leader in Beirut, Israel sends a message of aggression to the region, ringing war bells, according to experts.

“For months, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has done everything in his power to impede all diplomatic efforts aimed at ending the war. By killing the top Palestinian negotiator, Israel has delivered a final and decisive message that Israel remains invested in violence, and in nothing else,” says Ramzy Baroud, an author and a Palestinian political analyst.

“While Israel is, once more, accelerating its push for a wider conflict after ten months of a failed war on Gaza and a military stalemate against Hezbollah in Lebanon, this time around, it is engaging in a high-stakes game, the most dangerous of its previous gambles,” Baroud tells TRT World.

Haniyeh’s assassination came after Fatah, the leading group in the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), and Hamas, the party that governs Gaza, which are the two opposing Palestinian factions signed a China-sponsored reconciliation deal in Beijing, late July.

“Haniyeh has succeeded in forging and strengthening ties with Russia, China, and other countries beyond the US-western political domain,” says Baroud.

“This assassination may also be seen as a warning to Iran and Hamas in the aftermath of the Unity Deal between Hamas and Fatah that Israel may find threatening,” says Falk. Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas made a gesture of this new unity attempt by condemning Haniyeh’s assassination.

How will Iran respond?

Fatima Karimkhan, a Tehran-based journalist. assesses that Israel is “not happy” with a moderate government in Tehran because Israel has been against the US-led nuclear negotiations. The deal that was brokered during Obama’s presidency promised a kind of normalization between the West and Iran.

“They do whatever they can to pull Iran into a regional conflict so they can put more pressure on the international community to resist Iran,” she tells TRT World.

Falk also believes that Israel pushes Iran into a regional war with Haniyeh’s assassination, which is “a major such provocation, because of the location, the occasion, and the status of the targeted individual.”

“The scale of the Israeli provocations poses a great challenge to the pro-Palestinian camp in the Middle East, namely, how to respond with equally strong messages without granting Israel its wish of embroiling the whole region in a destructive war,” says Baroud.

But he still believes that pro-Palestinian forces in the region from Iran-led ‘Axis of Resistance’ to others are “certainly capable of managing this challenge despite the risk factors involved.”

Karimkhan believes that Iran has shown restraint in face of several Israeli provocations, and will avoid getting lured into war.

“This assassination is an act of state terrorism, and the international community should take a stand against it, not Iran itself. I don't see room for head-to-head conflict between Iran and Israel in this case,” she says.

“Israel is doing whatever it takes to put a shadow on what they are doing in Gaza. They are willing to start a regional conflict in hope for people to forget about all that has happened, and is still happening in Gaza.”