The assassination of Ismail Haniyeh "clearly had the support and foreknowledge of the United States and the United Kingdom," retired CIA intelligence officer and State Department official Larry Johnson insisted in an interview with Sputnik.
"I say that because we also have news reports now coming in that the US and UK warships are headed into the Mediterranean. On one of the US ships is probably a Marine Expeditionary Unit," Johnson said.
So the situation "has now escalated tensions in the region beyond what they were, even after the attack on the Iranian consul in April in Beirut," according to him.
Responding to that attack, Iran "sent a very clear message to Israel that in the future, any further provocations like this would be met with force, and now both Hezbollah and Iran have been incited to respond and Israel is calculating that it can withstand the blows," the former CIA intelligence officer added.
"This is extremely dangerous. […] This attack [on Haniyeh] was so blatant that I don't think there will be any restraint on the part of Iran or Hezbollah. I think that this may in fact have been crossing a red line. It is extremely worrisome because this has the hallmarks of being able to spin out of control. And it is, we're now in a situation of wait and see," Johnson stressed.
The remarks come after the Palestinian militant group Hamas confirmed in a statement that Haniyeh was killed in what Hamas said was an Israeli raid on his residence in Tehran after he attended the inauguration of the new Iranian President, Masoud Pezeshkian.
Haniyeh "passed as a result of a treacherous Zionist raid," Hamas insisted, while the movement’s politburo member Mousa Abu Marzook condemned the assassination as a "cowardly action" that he warned would not go unanswered.