GAZA STRIP (Dispatches) — Hamas says Israel’s “treacherous and cowardly” assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the former head of the resistance group’s political bureau, strengthened the resilience of the Palestinian people against the occupation.
Hamas released a statement Thursday, marking the first anniversary of Israel’s killing of Haniyeh in the Iranian capital of Tehran after he attended the inauguration ceremony of President Masoud Pezeshkian.
The Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) announced in a statement on July 31, 2024, that Haniyeh and one of his bodyguards were killed when their residence was hit in Tehran. Israel acknowledged that it killed Haniyeh while he was in Tehran last July.
In its statement, Hamas said time has proven that the policy of assassinating Hamas leaders only reinforced commitment to national rights and principles, and increased struggle and resistance until the occupiers are expelled from Palestinian land and its sacred sites.
The martyrdom was not a passing incident, but rather a turning point that demonstrated how resistance leaders stand at the very heart of the struggle and offer their loved ones in the path of resistance, just as a number of Haniyeh’s children and grandchildren were also killed, it added.
Hamas further stressed its commitment to Haniyeh’s call to designate August 3 as a national and international day to support Palestine.
“It is a matter of loyalty to the martyr leader Ismail Haniyeh that we continue to affirm his call to our people, our nation, and free people around the world, to make the third of August of each year a global national day to support Gaza ... al-Quds, al-Aqsa [Mosque], and the prisoners, and to continue the movement until the war of extermination and starvation against our people in the Gaza Strip stops, until the occupation is expelled from all our land, and until our people achieve their freedom,” it said.
Haniyeh’s assassination came amid an Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip, which began on October 7, 2023, following a historic Hamas operation against the usurping entity in retaliation for the regime’s intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
In its brutal Gaza onslaught, Israel has so far killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children.