In Pakistan, Morocco, Mauritania, Turkey, Tunis, Jordan, the West Bank and beyond, people around the world took to the streets on Wednesday, responding to the apparent assassination of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Iran.
Mr. Haniyeh was killed in Tehran early Wednesday, where he had just attended the inauguration of the country’s new president. Although Iran and Hamas announced Mr. Haniyeh’s death, accusing Israel of the killing, they have given few details about what took place. Israel has neither officially acknowledged nor denied responsibility.
News of Mr. Haniyeh’s death came shortly after Israel said late on Tuesday that it had killed Fouad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah commander in Lebanon, in a strike on the suburbs of Beirut. Israel said Mr. Shukr was responsible for the deaths of 12 children killed in a violent attack on a soccer field in the Druse Arab village of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on Saturday. Hezbollah had denied responsibility for that attack but has claimed responsibility for a continual slew of strikes on northern Israel since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel set off the war in Gaza.
The deaths of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders have raised fears among international diplomats that a wider war in the Middle East — which they have been hoping to avoid through many months of diplomacy — may be nearing an inevitability.
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Rally attendees on several continents carried images of Mr. Haniyeh and waved Palestinian flags as they marched. Mr. Haniyeh, who is reviled as a terrorist in Israel, and for whom the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor was seeking a warrant arguing reasonable grounds to believe that he had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, is being championed as a martyr for the Palestinian cause in some countries.
In Gaza, where civilians have endured nearly 10 months of fighting, destruction, disease and hunger because of a war that Hamas set off, Mr. Haniyeh’s death was met with mixed emotions, including apathy and anger about the Hamas leader, who lived in Qatar.
In Karachi, Pakistan, his supporters led a procession with a banner in English that read, “Down With U.S.A.” and “Down With Israel,” declaring their allegiance with Hamas and its fallen leader.
