assassination

WASHINGTON — Shortly before President Trump ended a ceasefire with Iran this week, Israeli officials presented his team with intelligence indicating Tehran was hatching new plots to kill him.

It was not the first such warning. U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies have tracked evidence for years of Iranian efforts to target the president, with signals only increasing since the start of the war.

Their desire to target Trump and his top aides began six years ago, just outside Baghdad International Airport, when the president ordered a drone strike that killed Iran’s most powerful general. The assassination of Qassem Suleimani brought the two countries to the brink of war.

Yet even as full-scale war was averted, top Iranian officials vowed revenge for the strike, authorizing attempts on the lives not just of the president, but of his secretary of State and national security advisor, among others, even after they had left office.

Now, calls for revenge have reached a sharper pitch in Tehran, after a joint U.S.-Israeli operation killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at the start of the war in February.

At Khamenei’s funeral ceremonies this week, red flags of vengeance flew throughout the capital as protesters explicitly called on their government to “kill Trump.” His son, Mojtaba, the new supreme leader, was absent from the commemorations, fearing assassination himself.

Mourners hold an anti-President Trump banner at the Imam Khomeini Grand Mosque during mass funeral prayers for Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his family in Tehran on Sunday.

(Morteza Nikoubazl / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The prospect of foreign assassination plots targeting U.S. leaders puts the United States in dangerous new territory, where its embrace of political killings could ultimately place its own officials at unprecedented risk. And experts fear the existential threat of assassination has pushed peace further out of reach: When both sides believe their survival is at stake, the trust required for diplomacy becomes far harder to achieve.

Israeli news organizations have reported that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, cited Iranian attempts to kill Trump in recent years as part of his case to go to war in the first place.

A U.S. official told The Times that a range of serious threats exist against the president, including from Iran, but that Israel’s intelligence pointed to a more specific plot. The official did not provide further details. Israeli officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has said in recent months that the government sees vengeance against U.S. officials as “its legitimate duty and right,” and “will fulfill this great responsibility and duty with all its might.”

“The Suleimani killing accelerated a lifting of restraints on foreign assassinations — and the taboo on targeting and killing foreign leaders, with U.S. military assets, has been more or less lifted,” said Matt Dallek, a political professor at George Washington University.

“If the United States sets the example of how to conduct international relations, and it is using assassination of foreign leaders as a political weapon, it’s only logical that other countries will be more inclined to also engage in assassinations,” Dallek added. “It does seem likely that Trump will have a bigger target on his back.”

Returning from a NATO summit in Turkey on Wednesday, Trump was forced to switch back to an old model of Air Force One — equipped with specialized defensive technologies — from a new plane given as a gift by Qatar, after the Secret Service warned of potential threats to the aircraft from Iran.

“They want to take out the U.S. leader — me,” Trump told reporters aboard the plane. “I’m on whatever list. I saw this morning I’m on every single one of their lists. And so far, I guess I’ve been a bit lucky, but maybe that doesn’t last very long.”

The threat has remained on his mind in the days since. In an interview with the New York Post, Trump told the reporter, “I hope you’ll miss me,” adding that he has “been on their list for a long time.” And in a subsequent social media post Friday night, he warned of a catastrophic response he instructed the administration to pursue in the event Tehran succeeds.

“1000 Missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he wrote, “with thousands of more to immediately follow, should the Iranian Government act on its threat, pronounced in many corners of the Globe, to assassinate, or attempt to assassinate, the sitting President of the United States of America, in this case, ME!”

The United States had a decades-old prohibition against assassinating foreign leaders before Trump’s presidency, codified in an executive order signed by President Ford in 1976 over concerns of a CIA plot to kill Fidel Castro.

The policy was only strengthened further by subsequent administrations, fearing a new international standard for targeted killings could result in unintended consequences in the halls of Washington.

Other administrations have been accused of targeting foreign leaders before. Under the Obama administration, an international coalition targeting the Libyan regime of Moammar Kadafi during the country’s 2011 civil war struck his fleeing convoy, leading to his capture and killing by rebel fighters.

But experts say Trump’s explicit targeting of Suleimani and Khamenei — and his public celebration of their deaths — marks a new paradigm.

“Through words and actions, President Trump has done more to normalize political violence than any other U.S. president, certainly in modern times,” said Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago and author of “Our Own Worst Enemies: America in the Age of Violent Populism.”

“On the international front alone, the president routinely brags about killing Iranian leaders and seizing the leader of Venezuela, among others,” he added, “to the point that assassination is becoming the new normal in international politics.”

WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Monday denied a request to disqualify top Justice Department officials from supervising the prosecution of the man charged with trying to kill President Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

Cole Tomas Allen had argued that involvement in his prosecution by Acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche and District of Columbia U.S. Atty. Jeanine Pirro created a potential conflict of interest because they were among many administration officials present at the April dinner. Allen’s attorney also had raised concerns about the close friendship between Trump and Pirro, a former Fox News commentator.

U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden wrote in his ruling that neither their attendance at the dinner nor Pirro’s personal relationship with the president merited their disqualification. McFadden noted that Allen is not charged with attempting to harm Blanche and Pirro, and there is no evidence to suggest he even knew they would attend the dinner.

“They are unlikely to be trial witnesses, nor do they meet the legal definition of victims,” wrote McFadden, who was nominated to the bench by Trump.

Allen has been accused of trying to breach a security checkpoint armed with guns and knives. He has pleaded not guilty to various charges, including assaulting a federal official with a deadly weapon and attempted assassination of the president. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted of the attempted assassination charge alone.

Allen also is accused of firing a shotgun at a Secret Service agent during the attack, which disrupted and ultimately prompted an early end to one of the highest-profile annual events in the nation’s capital. The Secret Service officer who was shot once in a bullet-resistant vest fired his own weapon five times without hitting anyone. Allen, of Torrance, California, was injured but was not shot.

Richer writes for the Associated Press.

The killing of Izz al-Din al-Haddad, the recently appointed head of Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, has dealt a symbolic blow to the Palestinian group in Gaza, but the impact on its military operations is far from certain.

Al-Haddad was killed on Friday in a sophisticated dual-strike on a residential apartment in Gaza City’s Remal neighbourhood and a vehicle attempting to flee the scene. The delivery of heavy munitions into a densely populated area, packed with displaced civilians, killed seven other Palestinians, including women and children, and wounded 50 people.

Yet, despite Israeli claims that the killing will cripple the group’s operational capacity, analysts argue that its decentralised nature is built to absorb such shocks. As the region watches to see how the resistance faction will respond, al-Haddad’s death raises critical questions about the future of the fragile “ceasefire” and who remains to lead the Qassam Brigades.

Operational impact: Will the Qassam Brigades collapse?

The killings of Qassam Brigades commanders, including Mohammed Deif, Marwan Issa, and Yahya Sinwar’s brother Mohammed, left al-Haddad as the key military figure managing the fight against Israel.

Saeed Ziad, a Palestinian political analyst, told Al Jazeera that while the loss is a “massive symbolic and moral blow” to Palestinians, the immediate operational impact on Hamas’s armed wing will be limited.

“The Qassam Brigades are not built on a hierarchical, sequential structure, but a parallel one,” Ziad explained. “Over the past two decades, Hamas has transitioned into a decentralised guerrilla force. Units operate as isolated, self-sufficient groups with their own logistical supply lines and combat doctrines.”

“If a brigade or battalion loses its commander, the group already knows its mission and has the resources to execute it independently,” he said. Reorganising the Qassam Brigades’ central command to cope with the loss will likely take mere days, not months.

Furthermore, al-Haddad had successfully utilised the October ceasefire with Israel to rebuild the group’s infrastructure. “Over the past 200 days, he reconstructed the resistance’s capabilities – its tunnels, weaponry and combat formations – making it capable of defending itself once again,” Ziad noted.

Who is left in the Hamas military leadership?

Israeli officials have boasted that they are close to dismantling Hamas’s central command, claiming that only two members of the military council before the pre-October 2023 attacks on Israel – Mohammed Awad and Imad Aqel – are alive.

However, analysts point out that Hamas’s military wing, which boasted roughly 50,000 fighters before the war, possesses a deep bench of cadres and a strict protocol for leadership succession that enables it to quickly recover when commanders are killed.

“The resistance typically appoints a first, second, and third deputy for every active commander, from the general commander down to the platoon leaders,” Ziad said. “Filling these voids happens rapidly.”

Hamas immediately confirmed Haddad’s death, with spokesperson Hazem Qassem officially mourning him as the “General Commander” of the Qassam Brigades. He stressed that despite his death being a “massive loss”, the group’s “long journey of resistance continues”.

The ‘Ghost’ of the Qassam Brigades

Born in the early 1970s, al-Haddad joined Hamas upon its inception in 1987. He rose through the ranks from an infantry soldier to commander of the group’s Gaza City Brigade, overseeing six battalions – each consisting of 1,000 fighters plus 4,000 support personnel.

He played a foundational role in establishing al-Majd – Hamas’s internal security apparatus designed to track down Israeli intelligence collaborators. But it was his ability to survive multiple assassination attempts – including bombings of his home in 2009, 2012, 2021, and three separate times during the current genocidal war on Gaza – that earned him the moniker “Ghost”.

Al-Haddad left an indelible strategic mark on the movement as a primary architect of the October 7, 2023 attacks. He personally oversaw the breach of the eastern fence, directed elite units that stormed the Re’im military base and the Fajja outpost. According to intelligence reports, it was al-Haddad who handed localised commanders a paper hours before the attack detailing the operation and ordering the capture of Israeli soldiers.

In January 2025, an Israeli air raid killed his son, Suhaib, but al-Haddad survived and continued to command operations and oversee the detention of Israeli captives until a deal was reached.

A fragile ‘ceasefire’ on the brink

Shortly after Friday’s strike, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz issued a rare joint statement, boasting that the killing was carried out under their direct orders.

Mohannad Mustafa, an analyst of Israeli affairs, said al-Haddad’s killing shows that Israel is attempting to “normalise” blatant violations of the “ceasefire” agreement, while the Netanyahu-Katz statement was an appeal to Washington to allow it to continue the killing campaign. At least 871 Palestinians have been killed since the “ceasefire” was announced on October 10, 2025, most of them civilians.

“Netanyahu is pitching this to the US administration as a necessary step to ‘disarm Hamas’ under the Trump plan,” Mustafa told Al Jazeera. “But the reality is that Israel never wanted this ceasefire. It was imposed on them.”

By systematically killing civilians, police, and military figures without offering immediate justifications for “ceasefire” breaches, Israel aims to provoke a response. “The ultimate goal is to force Hamas to retaliate, leading to the collapse of the agreement and giving Israel the green light to launch ‘Gideon 2’ – a military operation to occupy the entirety of the Gaza Strip,” Mustafa added.

With Netanyahu lacking a definitive strategic victory, such as the total surrender of Hamas, Ziad said the Israeli leadership is now leaning heavily on a “philosophy of assassinations” to project a “picture of victory” to its domestic base.

But history has shown that killings of leading military figures, such as al-Haddad, rarely have a significant long-term impact on armed Palestinian movements like Hamas.

“For the fighters and the society in Gaza, these killings create a blood covenant,” Ziad said. “It hardens their resolve. Retreating after the loss of leaders like Deif, Sinwar, or Haddad is viewed as a betrayal of that blood.”