Jeremy Scahill on New Head of Hamas, Questions About Haniyeh Assassination & Iran Retaliation

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We look now at how the Middle East is bracing for a possible broader regional war after Hamas’s top political leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran and a top Hezbollah commander was assassinated in Beirut last week. Israel took credit for the Beirut strike and has been widely accused of being behind the Haniyeh killing.

On Tuesday, Hamas named Yahya Sinwar to be the group’s new political leader replacing Haniyeh. Yahya Sinwar has served as Hamas’s top leader in Gaza since 2017, is credited with being the mastermind of the October 7th attack on Israel that killed more than 1,100 people.

For more on boiling tensions in the region, we go to Croatia, where we are joined by Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News. His recent piece is headlined “’Something came from the outside’: An Eyewitness Account of the Aftermath of Ismail Haniyeh’s Assassination.”

Jeremy, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you start off by finding out who you spoke to and what you found out?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, Amy, first, let’s set the scene here. Benjamin Netanyahu, the week before these assassinations, had celebrated his victory tour in the United States, where he not only stood before the U.S. Congress and got repeated standing ovations as though he was on some sort of a bloody bizarro version, you know, world version of a concert, where he was celebrating his genocidal war and receiving generous applause from both Democrats and Republicans, and he not only met with the sitting president, but also Kamala Harris, as well as Donald Trump, and the message that he heard from all three of them was that they were ironclad in their support for what they characterized as Israel’s security. Now, there was some difference in how each of those three people interacted with Netanyahu, but the most important thing for people to remember is that all three of them firmly support the bipartisan U.S. policy, which has led to this genocidal, scorched-earth war against the Palestinians of Gaza.

So, Netanyahu then comes back to Israel and immediately greenlights a series of assassinations. You have the killing in Beirut of Fuad Shukr, who was a senior Hezbollah commander. Also killed in that strike, we understand, was an Iranian military adviser to Hezbollah. And that was followed, just some hours later, by the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s political bureau. And Haniyeh had just returned back to a guest residence that is housed within a compound in northern Tehran that is controlled and guarded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the most elite military force in the country.

I spoke to Dr. Khaled Qaddoumi, who is Hamas’s senior representative in Tehran and also a member of its Arab and Muslim world outreach division of Hamas. He was on the second floor of this building. You know, they call it a guesthouse, but it’s basically like an apartment complex. And Dr. Qaddoumi was on the second floor. Ismail Haniyeh and his bodyguard were on the fourth floor. Dr. Qaddoumi described to me how he had not gone to the state dinner, which was held in honor of Iran inaugurating its new president. Ismail Haniyeh was there, as were many leaders from the region. Haniyeh gets back to the guest complex around 11:30. Dr. Qaddoumi and others gather with Haniyeh. He says that they were discussing the assassination of Fuad Shukr in Lebanon and what they were assessing might be the regional implications for a broader war and Netanyahu’s game plan. And then they retired to their rooms to go to sleep.

And Dr. Qaddoumi described hearing a massive shaking of the building. And he, you know, was disoriented, woke up, didn’t know what it was. He thought at first maybe there had been an earthquake on what he said was a kind of great scale. He gets out of the bedroom and just sees smoke. He discovers that the bathroom walls and part of the ceiling had collapsed in the room where he was. He goes out into the hallway. Other members of the Hamas delegation told him that there had been some sort of a strike on Ismail Haniyeh’s apartment.

Dr. Qaddoumi, who is a medical doctor, ran then up to the fourth floor, and he entered the guest suite where Ismail Haniyeh had been staying, and he discovered the body of Ismail Haniyeh, as well as his bodyguard. And he described to me seeing what appeared to be a massive hole in the exterior wall. It also had some windows. But he said it appeared to him as though some sort of a missile or other projectile had crashed into the room from the outside and that that was what had in fact killed Ismail Haniyeh.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jeremy, what do you make of the New York Times report that came out a few days later claiming that the explosion was a result of a bomb that had been smuggled into that residence months earlier? And, of course, that report was from Ronen Bergman, who is the New YorkTimes reporter probably most — closest to Israeli intelligence.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, Juan, that’s correct. You know, Israel has been clearly spinning a narrative. In fact, today, some of the top Israeli propagandists on social media have been pushing more details about this story, and they say that Mossad was able to coopt Iranians to go into the guest complex and plant these explosives. And they say that the perpetrators of the bombing of Haniyeh were captured on CCTV.

And Ronen Bergman was the first to report this in The New York Times, and he has a very long history of reporting on Mossad activities. He has close ties to Israeli intelligence. He wrote a book called Rise and Kill First, which is about the history of Israel’s assassination program. And really, this narrative is something that is sort of like pulled from the script pages of the series Tehran, the Israeli show about a covert Israeli agent who is operating inside of Iran trying to take down a nuclear reactor.

Now, I should say, in the interest of accuracy and fairness, we don’t know exactly what happened there. It is plausible that what is being promoted by The New York Times and, you know, Israeli propagandists is largely the truth, that they were able to penetrate the building, that they planted these explosives. The Iranians, though, have pushed back very, very strongly against that. They say that some sort of a projectile hit the building. In fact, Juan, within hours of the explosion inside of Haniyeh’s guest suite, Iranian news services were already saying that some sort of a projectile was seen hitting the building.

So, you know, it’s possible that what is being stated about a bomb being planted there is true. The Iranians are pushing back against it. Not just Dr. Qaddoumi from Hamas, but other eyewitnesses also described damage to the scene that appears consistent with a missile or a rocket or some sort of projectile hitting it. There’s been discussion that Israeli intelligence was able to penetrate either the mobile phone of Ismail Haniyeh or his bodyguard and that they were able to use tracking malware to pinpoint a precision missile strike against him. There have been reports that Ismail Haniyeh’s entire upper body was destroyed, which could either be consistent with a bomb under a bed that exploded or a missile directly hitting him if he was near his phone. So, we don’t know.

What we do know is that the Iranians are in a position to release forensic evidence. Presumably, in an IRGC compound, they also have video surveillance capabilities. We know that they did have counterespionage facilities there, as well as radar and, presumably, countermissile technology in the area. So, either way you slice it, though, this is very bad for Iran, because it indicates a security breach. Yes, it would probably be worse if they were able to penetrate the ranks of the IRGC and convert Iranians into agents. But the mere fact that Israel was able to do this assassination on Iranian soil is a very, very bad thing for Iran. And that lends some legitimacy to the fact that they’re saying that it was a missile strike, because even admitting that is very, very bad. But at the end of the day, the Iranians are in the best position to present evidence to the world of what happened.

I must say, though, that while this discussion is relevant — how did Israel assassinate thew leader of Hamas, the top negotiator in a process that Joe Biden is claiming is so central, that he wants a ceasefire right now — every time we talk about this or what the Israelis have succeeded in doing is distracting from the fact that the genocide in Gaza continues, that Netanyahu is serving as the chief arsonist in the Middle East, that he’s trying to draw the United States into war with Iran, that he’s trying to draw the United States into war with Hezbollah.

And, you know, for all the talk of Western countries about how Iran needs to show restraint, the truth is, and this is just a fact — it’s not politically correct to say it, but it’s factual — both Iran and Hezbollah, given what they’ve been facing, have already shown quite a bit of restraint. And the last time the Iranians responded to the Israelis was when Israel, on April 1st, launched a strike inside of Syria, in Damascus. They bombed the Iranian Consulate. They killed a dozen people. About half of them were IRGC personnel. Yes, Iran rained missiles down on Israel and sent fleets of drones toward Israel, but they did it in a highly telegraphed manner that allowed the United States and other countries to amass a very effective countermissile defense operation. I believe one person was killed in that Iranian missile strike.

So, you know, the devil is often in the details here. It’s very clear that Netanyahu has no intention of engaging in a ceasefire. He’s going to continue with the genocide in Gaza. And he really wanted to strike not just at Hamas, but, in many ways, this was a very bold operation to tell Iran, “We can strike whenever and wherever we want against you.”

AMY GOODMAN: We just have less than a minute, Jeremy, but your response to the latest news that Hamas has chosen Yahya Sinwar to replace Ismail Haniyeh, of course, who was assassinated and was the chief negotiator with Israel around the issue of a ceasefire?

JEREMY SCAHILL: My sources, Amy, have told me — within Hamas, have told me that this was a wartime decision, that they didn’t have time to assemble the full Shura Council and that the only sensible decision they could make was to fully support the on-the-ground commander of the military operations, which right now is Yahya Sinwar. This is also in line with recent polls that they’ve done in the Palestinian Occupied Territories that indicate that the popularity of Sinwar and Hamas, in general, are rising as the popularity of Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority are going down. It’s a statement that they understand Israel wants to fight to, quote-unquote, “total victory,” and they’re going to continued their operations, which they feel have been successful militarily in repelling and causing great harm to the Israeli military.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, we want to thank you so much for being with us, of Drop Site News. We’ll link to your recent piece headlined “’Something came from the outside’: An Eyewitness Account of the Aftermath of Ismail Haniyeh’s Assassination.” Jeremy is former senior reporter and correspondent at The Intercept.