JERUSALEM — Thousands packed Qatar’s largest mosque Friday for the funeral of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ political leader, hours after President Joe Biden said his killing could hurt the monthslong effort to negotiate a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip.
Haniyeh, who was based in the Persian Gulf nation, had been a negotiator in the cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas. His death in an explosion in Iran on Wednesday and the assassination of Hezbollah commander Fouad Shukur in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon on Tuesday have put the Middle East on edge, bracing for a possible escalation in retaliatory violence.
Asked by a reporter Thursday night whether the killing of Haniyeh had ruined the prospect of a negotiated cease-fire in Gaza, Biden said, “It has not helped.”
He added that he had a “very direct” conversation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel earlier that day and had urged him to agree to a deal to stop the war in Gaza and free the remaining people kidnapped in the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7.
“We have the basis for a cease-fire,” Biden said. “They should move on it now.”
Netanyahu’s office said Friday that an Israeli delegation planned to travel to the Egyptian capital, Cairo, on Saturday or Sunday for negotiations on a Gaza cease-fire and hostage-release deal.
He also said that Israel was preparing for the possibility of a retaliatory attack.
“Israel is in very high readiness for any scenario — both defensively and offensively,” Netanyahu said Thursday. “We will impose a very heavy price for any act of aggression against us from any front.”
The escalating tensions have put the region on high alert. Major airlines have suspended flights to Israel and Lebanon, and Israel’s National Security Council has warned that Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah could target Israelis abroad in the coming days.
The United States warned Americans on Wednesday against traveling to Lebanon or northern Israel. And the Pentagon was preparing to send additional combat aircraft to the Middle East in response to threats from Iran and its proxies in Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen to attack Israel, U.S. officials said Friday.
Israel, which has vowed to destroy Hamas’ governing and military capabilities, has not acknowledged that it was responsible for planting the bomb in the guesthouse in Iran’s capital, Tehran, that killed Haniyeh after he attended the inauguration of Iran’s new president.
But Iran and Hamas have blamed Israel and have vowed to attack the country directly. U.S. officials have assessed that Israel was, indeed, responsible for the killing and have been scrambling to keep the violence from spiraling out of control and to salvage a cease-fire deal.
Hezbollah, a Lebanese militia that, like Hamas, is backed by Iran, has also vowed to avenge the death of Shukur and to step up its attacks on Israel.
For many families of the Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza, Haniyeh’s killing has deepened their anxiety. They say they believe that reaching a deal to free the hostages as soon as possible is the only way to ensure that they come home alive.
“It seems like it will delay any possible resolution, cease-fire or hostage release,” said Jonathan Dekel-Chen, whose son Sagui was abducted from the Israeli community of Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7. “It could very easily mean that revenge, retribution is taken against our loved ones.”
At Haniyeh’s funeral in the Qatari capital, Doha, two coffins draped in Palestinian flags — one for the Hamas leader and another for his bodyguard, who was also killed in the explosion — were placed at the front of the mosque before a large crowd.
Haniyeh was later buried at a cemetery in the Qatari city of Lusail, according to news reports.
Palestinians in parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza joined in saying funeral prayers for Haniyeh on Friday. But few appeared to heed Hamas’ call for a “day of anger” to condemn his killing and Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in a hunt for Hamas.
In Gaza, much of the rage Friday seemed prompted by the familiar, grisly sight of rescuers and civilians pulling the dead and wounded from buildings destroyed by new Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City and Khan Younis.
On Thursday, at least seven Palestinian deaths were added to a toll that Gaza’s health officials said was nearing 40,000, many of them women and children, over almost 10 months of war.
And while Haniyeh’s funeral prayer in Qatar was held in the grandeur of a mosque, Palestinians in Gaza noted that funeral prayers for those killed in the territory — if they are said at all — have been recited either in hospital hallways or amid ruined buildings.
“Somebody, feel for us,” one man pleaded Friday in the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City as other men around him carried the dead in body bags after airstrikes there, according to video posted by Palestinian news media.
“We are dying,” the man said. “We are dying, oh, Arabs. We are dying, oh, world.”
At Al-Aqsa Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem, Sheikh Ekrima Sabri spoke of “the martyr Ismail Haniyeh” during his Friday prayer sermon and asked for mercy for the former Hamas leader’s soul.
Nearby, outside the Dome of the Rock prayer hall, Israeli paramilitary police patrolled the courtyard near worshippers trying to stay cool in the shade. There is a history of tension and clashes between Israeli police and Palestinian worshippers around the mosque compound, a contested site holy to both Muslims and Jews.
Israeli police later said they had started an investigation to determine whether there had been a “suspicion of incitement” in Sabri’s sermon and had summoned him for questioning. Police also said they had arrested another person who chanted “inciting remarks” during the prayer.
In the Shati refugee camp in northern Gaza, where Haniyeh was born in 1962, dozens of men and boys gathered to perform a funeral prayer on the ground floor of a damaged building.
Turkey, which sent dignitaries to Haniyeh’s funeral in Qatar, lowered the flag at its embassy in Israel to half-staff, infuriating Israeli officials and deepening a rift between the two countries. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has defended Hamas and harshly criticized Netanyahu.
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said Turkey’s deputy ambassador had been summoned for a “stern reprimand” over the lowering of the flag.
As international diplomats sought to calm tensions, Tor Wennesland, the United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, said Friday that he had engaged “in critical discussions” with officials from Lebanon, Qatar, Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East to “prevent a spillover of the conflict.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
© 2024 The New York Times Company