A few hours ago, the death of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was announced while he was staying in the Sa'dabad complex in Tehran (Iran), after attending the inauguration of the new Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian. Since the news broke, there have been many speculations regarding both the exact location of the attack that ended Haniyeh's life, and the way in which the action was carried out. There has been speculation, in relation to this, about the use of Israeli F-35I Adir fighter-bombers along with cruise missiles. Also with the possible use of combat helicopters, drones, and even anti-tank weapons and vehicle bombs. In addition, there has been speculation about the possible involvement of his own bodyguard, as well as the way in which Israel would have managed to infiltrate operatives into the Hamas leadership. In the following lines we evaluate these and other possibilities in light of the data that has emerged so far, trying to clarify the circumstances in which Haniyeh's murder occurred.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Plausible deniability
- How could the attack have been carried out?
- Possible consequences
Introduction
Iranian state television and the Shiite country's Revolutionary Guard announced early on Wednesday, July 31, the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (Ismail Haniya or Haniye, in Spanish), 61 years old. From the Islamic Resistance Movement, they quickly assured that the action had been, in reality, a “Zionist” attack. in a statement in which they stated that “The Hamas Islamic Resistance Movement mourns the death of our great Palestinian people, of the Arab and Islamic nation and of all the free peoples of the world: our brother, leader and martyr, Mujahid Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the movement, who was killed in a treacherous Zionist raid on his residence in Tehran.”
Social networks did not take long to echo the news, as did the media around the world, anticipating an escalation and an Iranian response that has not occurred for the moment, but could come. in the form of a missile attack similar to that of April 13. Not in vain, a few hours after the attack, various sources confirmed that the Iranian leadership had met, after which the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would have assured that avenging Haniyeh's death constitutes "Tehran's duty."
Haniyeh, who has been linked to several corruption cases, served as prime minister of Palestine between 2006 and 2007 and of the Gaza Strip between 2013 and 2014. He had led Hamas since 2017, after succeeding Khaled Meshal. In October 2023 he lost fourteen members of his family following an attack carried out by the Israeli IAF against Gaza City, although he was not affected since he had been living in comfortable exile in Qatar for years. Additionally, from May 20, 2024 He was the subject of an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity. committed in the territory of Israel and the State of Palestine (in the Gaza Strip).
With his death, pending the name of his successor, a leader who has contributed to bringing Hamas closer and closer to Iran leaves. who was behind the brutal terrorist attack against Israel in October 2023 and which has helped to leave a situation in the Middle East potentially explosive, with a growing possibility (although fortunately deterrence and escalation management appear to be working) that the current conflict will spread to Lebanon or degenerate into a direct clash between Israel and Iran.
Plausible deniability
Before getting into the subject, it is worth explaining to readers a basic concept in international relations, but one that rarely appears in the media; not even when news of this type shakes the newsrooms. We talk about "plausible denial", which basically consists of the ability to deny knowledge or responsibility for actions committed by oneself or by people under one's command. That is, regardless of whether or not someone is behind a certain event (as in this case, a possible selective murder), nothing can directly relate them to what happened, so that they can avoid their possible responsibilities at all times.
In these pages we have talked about plausible deniability on several occasions, such as regarding the Russian private military company Wagner Group. This, until the ties that united Prigozhin and his men with the Kremlin became evident, always acted in a kind of limbo, without the Russian Government acknowledging that it was behind the actions that the company's operatives carried out. .
It thus became a magnificent foreign policy tool, which allowed the Putin Administration to intervene abroad, in scenarios such as Syria, Libya, Central African Republic, Mozambique o Ukraine without exposing themselves directly, as they could at all times deny their relationship with the company founded by the ill-fated Prigozhin. After all, even though it was made up mostly of ex-military personnel from elite units and even though the relationship between the "Kremlin chef" and the Russian Government was known, it was one thing to accuse and quite another to prove.
Plausible deniability, however, goes beyond the employment of mercenaries and applies to virtually any covert operation, including the targeted assassination of high-value targets; a practice that Israel has employed regularly in recent years, with high-profile cases such as that of the former head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, General Qasem Soleimani. In this way, although not in all cases the Israelis (who are not the only ones who resort to this type of actions) have taken refuge in plausible deniability, in many of them, in order to avoid diplomatic or security crises - especially when the attacks occur on foreign soil -, yes it has been like that.
The above, applied to the case of Ismail Haniyeh, whose murder took place in Iranian territory, already helps us limit, at least in part, the ways in which the attack that cost the life of the until now Hamas leader could have been carried out. just. After all, if we assume that Israel does not wish at any time to carry out an action that could constitute a casus belli, we can begin to rule out some hypotheses, such as the use of fighter planes or helicopters in space. Iran air.
Thus, although it would be possible to use a cruise missile launched from a plane or drone located outside the borders of Iran, the possibility of a device (especially if it is a manned one) being shot down within this country is something to avoid on the part of Israel or any other actor that could be behind the attack that killed Haniyeh and his bodyguard. And in this case the cost/benefit ratio would be totally unfavorable to the attacker, since he would assume an enormous risk to obtain a very limited result. Hence the action was surgical and difficult to attribute; typical of the gray zone. A very different situation, for example, from that experienced during Operation Opera, in 1981, when Tel Aviv ordered a preventive air strike on a nuclear reactor under construction in Orirak (Iraq).
How could the attack have been carried out?
In the first moments after the attack, All kinds of theories were published on various social media accounts, each one more strange.. In some cases, there was talk of the use of a combat helicopter by Israel, something that is impossible to believe given the distances and the difficulty of avoiding the Iranian IADS with a device of that type; especially considering that we are talking about Tehran.
In addition, images of the supposed site of the attack were published that suggested that the amount of explosive used was enormous, because an entire building had practically been destroyed, when do not half an apple. However, this information would quickly be denied, and the exact location would be revealed shortly after.
The attack, in reality, had been carried out inside the Sa'dabad complex, located north of Tehran, linked to the Iranian presidency (35.81722729645684, 51.42449045786487). It is a residential area full of groves and palaces as well as, especially, museums. Precisely because it is relatively far from the urban center and protected from the eyes of curious people, it has sometimes been used to accommodate foreign dignitaries.
The assassination of Haniyeh, far from involving the destruction of an entire block, had been extremely precise, although perhaps not as much as some sources suggested, which used images from previous attacks (in this case of the attack against Aymán az Zawahirí in Kabul, on June 21, 2022) to illustrate the action.
In any case, based on the damage recorded in the building where the Hamas leader was staying (which was quickly covered by a green mesh to avoid indiscreet targets) the degree of destruction was minimal; Hence, it only cost the lives of Haniyeh himself and his bodyguard, who were in the westernmost corner of the building, presumably on the fifth floor, according to the image above.
This is where the problems begin. The fact that it was the upper part of the building and not the lower part that was destroyed rules out that the means used was a car or truck bomb, since they would have caused damage at ground level and in a larger area. Neither a machine of the type used to kill Moshen Fakhrizadeh, father of the Iranian nuclear program.
Furthermore, the scarcity of remains of the façade in the surroundings of the building would imply, a priori, that the explosion was not very powerful, which limits the possibilities regarding the missile used or its warhead. In fact, one could also say that it went from the inside to the outside, which would open the door to a missile that had detonated inside the room after entering through a window or to the theory of the explosive located inside the complex.
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