Hanija had been living in Qatar for several years, he was killed in Tehran after attending the swearing-in ceremony of the new president Masoud Pezeshkyan. According to the Qatari website Doha News, a funeral ceremony will take place on Friday after the traditional Friday prayers at a mosque in Doha, and then Hanij’s body will be taken to the city of Lusajl, where the Hamas leader will be buried.
The ceremonies in the Iranian capital were attended by the entire Iranian political elite on Thursday, including the supreme spiritual leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Pezeškján or the head of the Revolutionary Guards, Hossein Salami. Prayers in honor of Haniyeh were presided over by Khamenei, who vowed to avenge his death. He called Hanija “an outstanding fighter of the Palestinian resistance”.
The Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Mohammad Bágher Ghalibaf, said at the beginning of the ceremony in the premises of the University of Tehran that “the martyr Ismáil Hanija he was the voice of the Palestinian people around the world. He wasn’t just a leader. He was a wise man,” reported the al-Jazeera news website. He added that Haníj’s death will not go unanswered. “Our answer will come. At the right time and in the right place. It is difficult for us to have our guest be the target of an attack and be murdered on our soil,” Ghálíbáf said.
The Iranian government declared three days of national mourning on Wednesday after the killing of a senior Hamas official. At today’s ceremonies in Tehran, which Iranian media described as a state funeral, people carried the flags of Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestine, as well as photos of Haniyeh.
The killing of a Hamas political leader on Wednesday and an Israeli strike on Tuesday that killed senior Lebanese Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in a suburb of Beirut raised fears of an escalation in the nearly 10-month-old war in the Gaza Strip between Israel and the Iran-backed Hamas movement.
Hamas and Iran threatened to launch a retaliatory strike against Israel in the foreseeable future, the DPA news agency reported. Khamenei and President Pezeshkyan called the retaliatory action a legitimate right of the country, since the attack on Haniya was carried out on Iranian territory. Iran’s Security Council called an emergency meeting to discuss various scenarios. No details have yet been released, DPA added.
