PARIS: The killing of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh has exposed the depth of Zionist penetration inside the Islamic republic, analysts told AFP. Doha-based Haniyeh, who the day earlier had attended the inauguration of new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, was killed in the early hours of Wednesday morning at a residence in northern Tehran, according to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.The Zionist entity declined to comment.

Details on how Haniyeh was killed remain sketchy, with Iran’s Fars News Agency saying he was “martyred by a projectile from the air”. Reuters reported that a missile struck him “directly”, Hamas deputy chief in Gaza Khalil Al-Hayya said on Wednesday, citing witnesses who had been with Haniyeh in Iran. As a result of the missile strike, windows, doors and walls in his room were destroyed, Al-Hayya told a press conference in Tehran.

Analysts see the strike as a major intelligence failure by the Iranian services and a deeply disturbing development for the Iranian leadership, especially at a time when security would have been heightened due to the influx of guests for the inauguration. Hours before he was killed, Haniyeh had held a face-to-face meeting with Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “That the Iranians were not able to stop this assassination is very embarrassing for Iran,” said Agnes Levallois, deputy president of the Paris-based Institute of Research and Studies for the Mediterranean and Middle East (IREMMO).

‘Spies in Iran’

But the killing of Haniyeh is just the latest in a line of attacks believed to have been carried out by the Zionist entity inside Iran. The entity is long believed to have carried out sabotage operations through its Mossad espionage agency inside Iran, raising questions over how it appears able to obtain such detailed intelligence. “This is a confirmation of something we have all long known: The deep extent of penetration of Iranian security services by (the Zionist entity),” said Arash Azizi, senior lecturer at Clemson University in the United States.

In contrast to Hamas’s military leadership, Haniyeh was a figure relatively visible in public, making trips abroad including to Turkey where he held talks with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, including a meeting most recently in April. “We know the (Zionists) have spies and therefore intelligence in Iran,” said Levallois. “This assassination shows the entire (Zionist) intelligence system is very well developed to have all the information, and therefore allow the launching of this type of operation,” she said.

Most famously, according to The New York Times, Iran’s top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated in 2020 by Mossad using a machine gun that had been assembled close to his home by its agents and then fired remotely after they left. According to the same newspaper, the number two of Al-Qaeda Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, known as Abu Muhammad Al-Masri, was shot dead in Tehran by two assassins on a motorcycle in August 2020, in an attack by Zionist operatives at the behest of the United States.

Iran unleashed a barrage of missiles and drones in April, targeting the Zionist entity in retaliation for a suspected Zionist strike on its consulate in Damascus, which killed 13 people , including a general.

The entity responded to Iran’s first direct attack on its territory by reportedly in April striking a radar system of a Russian-supplied S-300 missile defense system in central Iran. The origin of that strike is not entirely clear, but it included at least one missile fired from a warplane outside Iran and small attack drones known as quadcopters that could have been launched from inside Iran itself and were aimed at confusing air defenses, the reports said.

‘Extremely precise information’

According to some outlets, including television channel Iran International, Zionist agents have even captured and interrogated Revolutionary Guards inside Iran to obtain intelligence. There have also been suspicions, after mysterious explosions around sensitive sites, that the Zionist entity has already carried out drone attacks inside Iran, but this has never been confirmed.

The killing of Haniyeh also came after the entity struck a Hezbollah stronghold in south Beirut on Tuesday, targeting a senior commander of the Lebanese militant group. “This operation shows that Iran was unable to secure the guests of the Supreme Leader and the president,” said Hasni Abidi, director of the Geneva-based Centre of Studies and Research on the Arab World and Mediterranean (CERMAM). He said the nature of the attack showed that the entity must have had “extremely precise information” about Haniyeh’s location and movements. — Agencies