Israel’s defence minister has for the first time acknowledged that Israel killed Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July.
Israel Katz made the comments in a speech vowing to target the heads of the Iran-backed Houthi movement in Yemen, which has been firing missiles and drones at Israel.
Haniyeh was killed in a building where he was staying in the Iranian capital in an attack widely attributed to Israel.
Separately, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said some progress had been made towards agreeing a ceasefire in Gaza with Hamas, but he could not give a timeline for when a deal would be reached.
It comes after a senior Palestinian official said that talks between Hamas and Israel were 90% complete, but key issues remained.
In his speech, Katz said Israel would “strike hard” at the Houthis and “decapitate” its leadership.
“Just as we did with Haniyeh, Yahya Sinwar, and Hassan Nasrallah in Tehran, Gaza, and Lebanon, we will do so in Hodeida and Sanaa,” he said, referring to Hezbollah and Hamas leaders who have all been killed this year.
Haniyeh, 62, was widely considered Hamas’s overall leader and played a key role in negotiations aimed at reaching a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.
After his assassination, Hamas named Yahya Sinwar, its leader in Gaza and one of the chief architects of the 7 October attacks, as the group’s overall leader.
Sinwar was killed by the Israeli military in a chance encounter in Gaza in October and the group is still in the process of choosing a new leader.
Hassan Nasrallah meanwhile was the leader of the Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah he was assassinated in Beirut in September as Israel dramatically escalated its military campaign against Hezbollah, with which it had been trading near daily cross-border fire since the day after the 7 October attacks.
The Houthis, an Iran-backed rebel group that controls north-western Yemen, began attacking Israeli and international ships in the Red Sea shortly after Israel began targeting Hamas in Gaza last October.
The group has vowed to continue until the war in Gaza ends.
Erizia Rubyjeana
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