Just days after Israel admitted it had killed Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last summer, its intelligence service has revealed that the operation was nearly scuppered after a technical glitch in the site of the killing.
A report from Israel’s Channel 12 revealed that an explosive device was planted in advance in the bedroom of the secret Neshat compound of the Revolutionary Guards, before an air conditioning malfunction almost jeopardized the entire operation.
Haniyeh was guarded by the IRGC’s elite Ansar al-Mahdi unit, known for their expertise in hand-to-hand combat, staying in the IRGC’s Neshat compound, a top secret accommodation facility which hosts top government officials and foreign dignitaries.
Haniyeh slept in the same room around eight times, making the location ideal for an assassination but when the air conditioner in Haniyeh's room broke down, he was forced to leave after a bomb had been planted ready for the killing.
"The operation was on a tightrope," a senior security source told Channel 12. "There was a fear that his room would be replaced with another. Finally, they managed to fix the air conditioner, and he returned to his original room until the sky went up.”
A hole was blown through the outer wall, shaking the whole compound at around 1:30 am, with a massive explosion.
A first aid team on the compound ran to the site and Haniyeh’s bodyguard found his body bleeding on the floor. The report says he fell to his knees and burst into tears in the dramatic moment the group, designated terrorists by countries including the US and UK, began to see its top leadership crumbling.
One of the boldest and most complex operations of its kind, Israel had ruled out killing Haniyeh in Qatar for fear of jeopardizing hostage negotiations which Qatar was mediating, while killing him in Turkey, the group’s other outpost, risked the wrath of both Turkey and its ally Russia.
After October 7, documents found in Gaza revealed Haniyeh, once considered less a target than the likes of Hamas’s Gaza leader, Yahya Sinwar, revealed the leader in exile was closely tied to the plans which led to the most deadly single day for Jews since the Holocaust.
Over the years, he had evaded multiple assassination attempts, and Iran was an unlikely location, but the channel 12 report has shown that plans were underway for an operation to take place while Haniyeh was attending the funeral of Ebrahim Raisi, killed in a mysterious helicopter crash in May.
That plan was shelved due to concerns of killing civilians, and decided to take place after the President’s inauguration, so as not to overshadow the incoming president’s state ceremony.
Haniyeh was the critical link in building Hamas’s ties with Iran since he took over as the political chief in 2017. In March 2022, Haniyeh revealed that the Islamic Republic paid a total of $70 million to Hamas to help it develop missiles and defense systems, in an interview with Al Jazeera.
The July 31 killing led to huge unrest among Iran’s security chiefs, with the head of the IRGC’s Quds Force, Esmail Qaani, disappearing and later reappearing amid the embarrassment. Now, Iran’s top leaders have yet to discover and reveal the source of the infiltration, leaving deep suspicion in the heart of Iran’s once impenetrable IRGC.
Haniyeh was replaced by Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar, who took over as the group’s political head, shortly before he was also killed by Israel in October, just over a year since the October 7 attacks he had masterminded.