Iran Has Accused Israel of Assassinations on Its Soil Before

by Pelican Press
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Iran Has Accused Israel of Assassinations on Its Soil Before

Hamas and Iran on Wednesday accused Israel of assassinating Ismail Haniyeh, one of the Palestinian militant group’s most senior figures, in Tehran.

Israel had yet to comment on the killing of Mr. Haniyeh, the political leader of one of Iran’s biggest regional allies. Iran and Israel have fought a covert war for years, blaming each other for sabotage, abductions and targeted killings across the region.

Tehran has also accused Israel of past assassinations inside Iran. Here are some of those high-profile cases:

Iran’s top nuclear scientist

In November 2020, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a scientist described by U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies as a leading figure in Iran’s nuclear weapons program, was shot and killed in an ambush. The killing was carried out with a remote-controlled machine gun, officials said.

Mr. Fakhrizadeh was one of Israeli intelligence’s top targets for years, and Iran angrily accused Israel of killing him. Israel has never publicly commented on the assassination. Mr. Fakhrizadeh was an academic, but U.S. intelligence assessments said that was a cover for his work on nuclear weapons.

He wasn’t the first scientist linked to the nuclear program to be attacked on Iranian soil. Two others were targeted with car bombs 20 minutes apart in different areas of Tehran, the capital, in 2010. One was killed, the other injured.

A Revolutionary Guards commander

In May 2022, two assassins on motorcycles shot and killed Col. Sayad Khodayee, an officer in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Iran blamed Israel and vowed revenge.

As in other such cases, Israel made no public comment on the killing, but it told the United States it had targeted the officer. Israeli officials said Colonel Khodayee was the deputy commander of a unit that planned and carried out covert operations around the world, including assassinations and abductions.

Israeli officials said that group, called Unit 840, was a part of the Quds Force, the arm of the Revolutionary Guards that specializes in covert operations and espionage. A U.S. drone strike killed Qassim Suleimani, the Quds Force leader, in Iraq in 2020.

Mysterious poisonings

In May 2022, two Iranian scientists suddenly fell ill and died within days of each other, in cities hundreds of miles apart.

Ayoub Entezari, an aeronautical engineer at a military research facility, and the geologist Kamran Aghamolaei both developed symptoms of food poisoning, and their conditions deteriorated rapidly. Iran believed Israel had poisoned their food, according to an Iranian official.

Israel had no comment. But if it were behind the men’s deaths, it would have suggested an expansion of the campaign of assassinations, going beyond high-ranking officials in the nuclear program and senior military officers.



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