A prominent Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh has been killed in an Israeli raid on his residence in Tehran.
The news was confirmed in a statement
released on Wednesday.
According to Hamas group,
Haniyeh died after participating in the inauguration ceremony of the new
Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian who was sworn in on Tuesday.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard
Corps said the cause of the "incident" was not immediately clear but
was "being investigated", AFP news agency reported.
Haniyeh, 62, was a prominent
member of the Hamas movement in the late 1980s.
Israel imprisoned Haniyeh for
three years in 1989 as it cracked down on the first Palestinian uprising.
He was then exiled in 1992 to a
no-man's-land between Israel and Lebanon, along with a number of Hamas leaders.
Haniyeh was appointed
Palestinian prime minister in 2006 by President Mahmoud Abbas after Hamas won
the most seats in national elections, but he was dismissed a year later after
the group ousted Mr Abbas' Fatah party from the Gaza Strip in a week of deadly
violence.
Haniyeh rejected his sacking as
"unconstitutional", stressing that his government "would not
abandon its national responsibilities towards the Palestinian people", and
continued to rule in Gaza.
He was elected head of Hamas's
political bureau in 2017.
In 2018, the US Department of
State designated Haniyeh a terrorist. He had lived in Qatar for the past
several years.
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