Iran’s New President Has to Choose: Death to Israel or Reform for Iran?

Ismail Haniyeh should have known that Tehran wasn’t a safe place for him to be. What has Israel ever wanted to do on Iranian territory that it hasn’t been able to accomplish? In 2018, it stole the country’s entire nuclear archive. In 2020, it killed Iran’s top nuclear-weapons official. In 2022 and 2023, it reportedly abducted, interrogated, and then released security officials who were planning actions against Israeli tourists in the region—and it did this entirely on Iranian soil. Such extensive operations show that Mossad has deeply penetrated Iran’s security architecture, much as it has in the hit Israeli TV show Tehran.

Details are still emerging about the strike on Haniyeh, Hamas’s highest-ranking political leader, who was killed in Tehran in the early hours today. The assassination comes at an incredibly tense moment, less than 24 hours after Israel used an air strike to take out Fuad Shukr, a top Hezbollah official, in Beirut. Hezbollah has not confirmed Shukr dead, and Israel has not taken responsibility for the attack on Haniyeh. But fingers will naturally point to the country with both the capacity and the motive to go after the Hamas leader.

Israel has a history of targeting militant leaders behind the killing of its citizens. Palestinian militants massacred Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972, and Israel responded with Operation Wrath of God, a string of assassinations of militant leaders all over the world that ended only in 1988. Israel was always going to find and kill Haniyeh, a leader of the group that perpetrated October 7, the most lethal terror attack in the country’s history.

But the 62-year-old Haniyeh, used to safely hobnobbing with dignitaries in Qatar and Turkey, presumably didn’t expect such a brazen attempt on his life in the Iranian capital, where he had been staying for a few days to attend the inauguration of President Masoud Pezeshkian. He was killed before the arrest warrant that prosecutors at the International Criminal Court requested for him could be ever issued (the court has also requested a warrant to arrest Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu).

The extent of Israeli ease of operations in Iran is jaw-dropping. The Islamic Republic likes to claim that even if Iran is not democratic, free, or prosperous, at least it’s safe and secure. The regime enrolls tens of thousands of men in an alphabet soup of security forces—and yet it can’t seem to guard even highly valued guests, such as Haniyeh.

[Read: In the game of spy vs. spy, Israel keeps getting the better of Iran]

The regime’s security failures would be embarrassing for any sovereign state anywhere, but they are not hard to fathom when you consider the focus of Tehran’s repressive apparatus. Iran’s prisons are filled with dissidents, feminists, trade unionists, and ordinary folks who have committed such crimes as posting dance videos online. Hours before Haniyeh’s assassination, Tehran’s prosecutors pressed charges against a cartoonist and a journalist for the crime of openly discussing gay and lesbian life in Iran. We Iranians have long known that the regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is adept at going after its own citizens but can do little when faced with the military might of adversaries such as the United States and Israel.

Iran also suffers from a technology gap compared with Israel, which is a powerhouse in this department. In 2020, Israel assassinated a top Iranian security official near Tehran using AI-powered remote-controlled technology to get inside a maximum-security area. An Iranian security source based in London, who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the media, told me that Israel used similarly advanced equipment to track Haniyeh. Battered by Western-led sanctions, Iran lacks access to the means to counteract or compete with Israel’s prowess in this field.

Killing Hamas’s top leader in Tehran would have been hair-raising at any time. Coming in the midst of Israel’s cease-fire negotiations with the group on one hand, and an ever-escalating exchange of fire between Israel and Hezbollah on the other, the assassination will naturally send a shiver down many spines. Is this a prelude to the broader regional war that so many observers have feared these many months?

Ayatollah Khamenei has already called for “a harsh revenge.” Pezeshkian has promised to “make the terrorist occupiers regret their cowardly act.” And yet, many commentators in Iran are calling for prudence. A well-known hard-line activist suggested that Israel had carried out the killing in order to hurt Pezeshkian and disrupt possible Iran-U.S. talks. He called on his supporters to refrain from attacking Pezeshkian on this account.

Call me a cautious optimist, but I think a major escalation can likely be avoided. Iran has few obvious ways of responding proportionally to this attack, and it is well aware that a broader conflagration will put Iran itself at unacceptable risk. Many in Hezbollah will press for further attacks on Israeli territory, and the exchange of fire on the Israel-Lebanon border will continue. The danger of this leading into something bigger is always present, especially as long as a cease-fire hasn’t been reached in Gaza. But both sides have strong motives to avoid an all-out war, which would likely be the toughest conflict in either of their histories.  

[Read: The big war no one wants in the Middle East]

Pezeshkian has just had about the worst first day in office possible. He probably rose in the wee hours today to chair a meeting of the Supreme National Security Council, tasked with responding to these events. His inauguration speech to Parliament yesterday promised good neighborly relations and constructive engagement with the West—even while it also pledged full support for the Axis of Resistance, as Tehran calls the regional network of anti-Israel militias that it funds and arms to the teeth. Haniyeh was sitting in the front row for that speech, alongside leaders of other Axis forces, such as Hezbollah, the Yemeni Houthis, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Pezeshkian’s verbal attacks on Israel led the chamber to break out in chants of “Death to Israel” and “Death to America.”

The new reformist president and the broader Iranian establishment have just gotten a stark reminder that their declared program—of improving ties with the region and the West while simultaneously waging war against Israel—rests on a contradiction. They might have to pick one.