Iran holds military drills as retaliation expected against Israel over death of Hamas leader

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards has begun military drills amid the expectation it will retaliate against Israel over the killing of a senior Hamas member.

The drills, which started on Friday, are ongoing in the western province of Kermanshah close to the border with Iraq to
“enhance combat readiness and vigilance,” an armed forces official told Iran’s official news agency IRNA on Sunday.

Iran has claimed Hamas’s top political leader Ismail Haniyeh was “assassinated” in its capital Tehran on Wednesday 31 July. Retaliation has been expected since.

Israel has not claimed or denied responsibility for Mr Haniyeh’s death.

Western countries have been urging Iran to show restraint – with fears a response could lead to a regional war.

However, sources have told US media that the Israeli intelligence community believes Iran has decided to launch a direct attack and will do so within days.

Barak Ravid, a reporter with US media site Axios, said his two sources told him this marks a change in Israel’s assessment of Iran’s position.

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Mr Ravid said one of the sources told him there has been an internal debate in Iran between the Revolutionary Guards and President Masoud Pezeshkian over a potential response to the death of Haniyeh.

The Revolutionary Guards has been pushing for a severe response while Mr Pezeshkian believes this should be avoided, Mr Ravid claims.

The reports come as Israel’s war on Gaza is into its tenth month.

The war began when Hamas-led militants burst through Israel’s defences on 7 October and rampaged through farming communities and army bases near the border, killing some 1,200 people – mostly civilians – and abducting around 250 people.

Gaza’s health ministry says the number of Palestinian deaths is approaching 40,000.

On Saturday, an Israeli strike on a school-turned-shelter left 80 people dead in the Palestinian territory.

An estimated 6,000 displaced people were sheltering in Tabeen school when it was struck by three missiles, according to a spokesperson for the Civil Defence agency, which operates under the Hamas-run government.

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The Israeli military ordered the evacuation of Palestinians in southern Gaza early on Sunday.

The evacuation orders apply to areas in Khan Younis, including part of an Israeli-declared humanitarian zone from which the military said rockets had been fired.

The vast majority of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people have been displaced by the war, often multiple times.

Hundreds of thousands have crammed into squalid tent camps with few public services or sought shelter in schools such as the one struck on Saturday. Palestinians say nowhere in the besieged territory feels safe.

Israel accuses Hamas and other militants of hiding among civilians and launching attacks from residential areas.

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