TEHRAN, Aug 1: Iran held a funeral ceremony on Thursday with calls for revenge after the killing in Tehran of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in a strike blamed on Israel.
Thousands of mourners paid respects to Haniyeh as the Israeli military confirmed that an air strike in Gaza last month killed the Hamas military chief, Mohammed Deif.
Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei led prayers for Haniyeh ahead of his burial in Qatar, having earlier threatened a "harsh punishment" for his killing.
In Tehran's city centre, crowds, including women shrouded in black, carried posters of Haniyeh and Palestinian flags in a procession and ceremony that began at Tehran University, according to an AFP correspondent.
Iran's Revolutionary Guards announced the day before that Haniyeh and a bodyguard were killed in a pre-dawn strike Wednesday on their accommodation in Tehran.
It came just hours after Israel killed a top Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr, in a retaliatory strike in the south of Lebanon's capital Beirut, raising fears of a wider regional conflict as the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza continues.
Shukr is to be buried on Thursday.
Senior Iranian officials including President Masoud Pezeshkian and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps chief, General Hossein Salami, attended the ceremony for Haniyeh, state TV showed.
Qatar-based Haniyeh had been visiting Tehran for Pezeshkian's inauguration ceremony on Tuesday.
Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas's foreign relations chief, vowed during the funeral ceremony that Haniyeh's message will live on and "we will pursue Israel until it is uprooted from the land of Palestine".
Pezeshkian later told Hayya that Iran "will continue to support with firmer determination the Axis of Resistance", Iran-aligned regional groups that include Hamas, the official IRNA news agency said.
The caskets, with a black-and-white pattern resembling a Palestinian keffiyeh scarf, were borne on a flower-decorated truck through city streets jammed with mourners cooled by water spray on a hot day.
Iran's parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said, "It is our duty to respond at the right time and in the right place," as crowds chanted "Death to Israel, Death to America!" —AFP
