Sometimes you have to go with your gut instincts, and I wish I'd stuck with mine yesterday.
Wednesday morning it was my happy duty to report on the assassination of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, Iran, the night before. "My first thought was that a Mossad assassination team had snuck in, done some dirty work that needed doing, and then snuck back out," is what my gut assured me had happened. But then reports came in that Haniyeh had been killed in a precision airstrike. But no.
"Never trust first reports." I'm going to write that on a blackboard 100 times later today — and not for the first time, either.
If you weren't familiar with Haniyeh or missed yesterday's column, he was usually presented as the "moderate" face of Hamas because our press seems to be largely made up of willing dupes and terrorist sympathizers. They would never put it that way, of course. In their minds, they're just on the side of "the oppressed." In Haniyeh's case, he was oppressed to the tune of an estimated three billion dollars he'd skimmed off of Western relief funds for the Arabs of Gaza.
To be fair, his voice has been moderated since last night.
— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) July 31, 2024
Haniyeh has been on the State Department's Specially Designated Global Terrorists list since 2018 for his "close links with Hamas’ military wing" and for his support of "armed struggle, including against civilians." The State Department report also said, "He has reportedly been involved in terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens." Even the International Criminal Court, often useless in the extreme, sought an arrest warrant for Haniyeh earlier this year for "war crimes and crimes against humanity including murder, rape, torture and taking hostages," involving the Hamas Oct. 7 terror invasion of Israel.
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So don't be fooled. Haniyeh finally got it as good as he'd spent his foul existence giving it.
Israel has been going hard after Hamas leadership since Oct. 7 and an airstrike in April — possibly with Haniyeh in mind — killed three of his sons who were then praised as martyrs. Haniyeh is also now being praised as a martyr by his vicious former hosts in Tehran.
"At the appropriate time and place, we will have a suitable response," Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf, Speaker of the Iranian Parliament said at Haniyeh's memorial on Wednesday. "It is hard for us that our guest died a martyr's death. We will avenge the blood of the martyr Haniyeh, who was the voice of the oppressed Palestinian people."
Now then, about that martyrdom...
Haniyeh had been staying at a "heavily guarded complex" in Tehran, according to the New York Times — an official state guesthouse "run and protected by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps." Nevertheless, Israel was able to
- Ascertain which room Haniyeh used during his stays there.
- Slip a remote-detonated bomb under his mattress.
- Ascertain when Haniyeh was back in Tehran.
- Make bomb go boom while Haniyeh slept.
This is all according to local sources who spoke to the Times with the usual protection of anonymity.
As martyrdoms go, Haniyeh's was delightfully ignominious — in no small part due to Israeli operational genius, plus serious failures on the part of Iranian intelligence and the dreaded Revolutionary Guard. I shouldn't laugh, but I just can't help it.
Iran has vowed to strike directly at Israel in retaliation, so please consider this a developing story.
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