US says it was not involved in top Hamas leader assassination

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. was not involved in the death of top Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed early Wednesday morning in an apparent assassination in Iran.

Blinken, who is on a multicountry trip to the Indo-Pacific, told Channel News Asia the U.S. was “not aware of or involved in” the assassination.

At at separate event Wednesday in Singapore, Blinken reiterated his support for a cease-fire and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas.

“It’s profoundly in the interest of putting things in a better path,” he said of a deal. “We’ll continue to work at that every day.”

Blinken added it was difficult “to speculate” if the death of Haniyeh would complicate a potential cease-fire and hostage release deal, which aims to halt the fighting in Gaza and return the 116 hostages still held by Hamas.

Israel has not commented on the death of Haniyeh, who has been living in exile in Qatar for several years but was on a visit to Iran’s capitol of Tehran when a drone or rocket struck his building, killing him and his bodyguard, according to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Iran and Hamas have blamed Israel for the death of Haniyeh and have vowed revenge in response.

It would be somewhat rare for Israel to strike Iranian soil, which Israeli officials are aware would likely provoke an escalation as fighting rages across the Middle East between Iranian-backed proxies and Israel.

But Israel is suspected of being behind the death of Iranian scientists on Iran’s soil in 2020, and in April, Israeli forces carried out a limited attack in the country following Tehran’s massive drone and rocket strike on Israel.

The Haniyeh strike comes just one day after Israel targeted and claimed to have killed the top military commander of Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon’s Beirut in response to the militia group’s rocket attack that killed 12 children in Israel.

Fears are mounting that Israel and Hezbollah, which have been trading cross-border fire for some 10 months, are headed to a war, even if a deal is reached to stop the fighting in Gaza, where more than 39,000 Palestinians have been killed.

Israeli forces have targeted several top Hamas officials as they seek to take out the leadership following the deadly Hamas attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, which killed some 1,200 people and took some 250 hostages.

Israel may have taken out Hamas’s military chief, Mohammed Deif, in a June strike, though his death is not confirmed. The top Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, remains at large and is believed to be hiding out in the group’s vast tunnel network.

Haniyeh’s death is a major blow to Hamas, since he had led the militant group since 2017 and been the most visible face of its political side.