Between Iran and Gaza: How Israel pushed forward to decimate Hamas before Haniyeh's killing

The strained relationship between Iran and Israel hit another significant low when the Hamas chief and the man who had orchestrated the October 7 attacks - Ismail Haniyeh - was killed in "a treacherous Zionist raid on his residence in Tehran" on July 30 (Tuesday).

Soon after Haniyeh was killed, Israeli Minister Amichay Eliyahu reacted to the news on X and said, "This is the right way to clean the world from this filth."

Haniyeh was the face of Hamas, a Palestinian terror group which is believed to have received massive support from Iran. The killing of the Hamas leader has led to diplomatic discomfiture because of his presence in Tehran and Iran's failure to protect him.

Haniyeh's death is likely to affect the ceasefire and hostage negotiations between Israel and Hamas and has once again reminded the world of the ongoing covert war between Iran and Israel through proxies and targeted assassinations.

It has also raised questions over the safety of Iran'stop leaders and the capability of Israel in targetting them.

In recent years, various high-profile assassinations and attacks have been carried out by Israel in Iran. In retaliation, Iran has also attacked Israel and launched missiles at it.

Let's look back at the attacks allegedly carried out by Israel on Iran:

On January 12, 2010, Tehran University's physics professor Masoud Ali Mohammadi lost his life after a remote-controlled bomb - which was planted on a motorcycle - went off. Iran's government called him a nuclear scientist but said he was not working for the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran. Iran blamed Israel and the United States for the killing.

Nearly 30,000 computers of at least 14 nuclearfacilities were infected with the Stuxnet computer virus, which was detected at the Bushehr nuclear power plant in June 2010. The virus led to an explosion of engines in IR-1 centrifuges and at least 1,000 centrifuges installed at Natanz were destroyed.

Another virus, nicknamed ‘Stars,’ was detected by Iran’s cyber defence in April 2011 for damaging nuclear facilities.

Two gunmen killed an electrical engineer Darioush Rezaeinejad on July 23, 2011. He was reported to be working at a national security research facility. However, Iran denied Darioush's involvement in the nuclear programme.

Chemical engineering graduate Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan was killed by two people on a motorbike after they planted a bomb in his car on January 11, 2012, in northern Tehran. This time, Iran accepted that Ahmadi Roshan was the Natanz Uranium Enrichment facility's supervisor.

The “Wiper” malware was detected by Iran in April 2012 after it cleared all data from the hard drives of computers that belonged to the oil ministry and the National Iranian Oil Company.

Another virus, called ‘Flame,’was found by Iran on May 9, 2012, after it hit government computers and made an attempt to steal data.

A warehouse - which contained a vast archive of nuclear programmes carried out in Iran - was raided by a Mossad team on January 31, 2018, in Tehran. In the raid, around 50,000 pages and 163 compact discs were smuggled out of the country. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on April 30 that they had some 100,000 “secret files that prove” Iran had a nuclear weapons programme.

Iran’s main nuclear enrichment site at Natanz faced extensive damage due to an explosion on July 2, 2020, and pushed the programme behind by months.

Watch:Hamas Chief Ismail Haniyeh assassinated: Palestine President says, 'It was a cowardly assassination'

Iran’s leading nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was killed in an ambush in November 2020. Fakhrizadeh was killed using a remote-controlled machine gun.

Natanz nuclear plant was hit by an explosion on April 11, 2021, because of which the power supply for centrifuges was damaged. In the attack, “thousands of centrifuges” were destroyed, which led to the blackout.

Hundreds of drones kept at abase near Kermanshah in western Iran were reportedly destroyed by six Israeli quadcopters on February 14, 2022.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards commander Col. Sayad Khodayee was shot and killed by two assassins on motorcycles in May 2022.

The Parchin military complex in Tehran was hit by quadcopter suicide drones which were loaded with explosives on May 25, 2022.

The health of two Iranian scientists suddenly deteriorated and they died within days in May 2022. As per an Iranian official, an aeronautical engineer at a military research facility Ayoub Entezari and geologist Kamran Aghamolaei had symptoms of food poisoning.

A military facility in central Isfahan was hit by suicide drones laden with explosives which were reportedly sent by Israel’s Mossad on January 28, 2023.