A broken air conditioning unit nearly scuttled Israel’s July 31 assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who appeared on the verge of changing rooms before staff at the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ guesthouse in Tehran managed to fix the cooling system.

Axar.az reports that citing Times of Israel,The Israeli decision to take out Haniyeh came shortly after October 7, when the Hamas leader was placed somewhere at the top of a list compiled by senior intelligence officials. It was only a matter of when.

Haniyeh lived in Qatar, but killing him there risked torpedoing the hostage negotiations that Doha has mediated since the start of the war. Accordingly, the options for where to kill Haniyeh were Turkiye, Moscow and Tehran — the three countries frequented by the Hamas leader.

Israel feared a furious reaction from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and similarly did not want to anger Russian President Vladimir Putin, leaving Iran as the most suitable option, the network said.

The fact that Haniyeh stayed repeatedly in the same IRGC guesthouse in the luxurious northern Tehran neighborhood of Sa’adat Abad made the operation easier to plan.

The initial Israeli plan was to kill Haniyeh when he came to Tehran for the funeral of former Iranian president Ibrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash on May 19. However, the operation was shelved amid concerns that it would lead to the deaths of civilians.

Israel waited with the operation for more than two more months when Haniyeh returned for the inauguration of new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.

Shortly before the ceremony, agents installed an improvised explosive device in Haniyeh’s room near his bed. Shortly before the planned detonation, the AC unit in Haniyeh’s room broke down, and the Hamas leader left his room in order to request assistance. He was gone for so long that Israel feared that Haniyeh was being moved to a different room, which would have scuttled the entire operation.

After some time, though, the AC unit was fixed and Haniyeh returned to his room. At around 1:30 a.m., the IED was detonated, blowing a hole through the outer wall of Haniyeh’s guest room and rocking the entire IRGC compound.

Within seconds, an on-site IRGC first-aid team arrived at Haniyeh’s room where it was forced to declare his death shortly thereafter.

Hours after the assassination, Qaani himself called Iran Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and told him that Haniyeh had been killed in an Israeli missile attack. Khamenei immediately ordered Iran to retaliate against Israel.

The message to the Iran supreme leader was the source of further embarrassment for the IRGC, given that it very quickly became clear to those who surveyed the guesthouse that a missile was not the cause of Haniyeh’s death.

Analysts who spoke with the network said the operation was too complex to be carried out by Israeli agents, explaining that Iranian citizens, IRGC members or Hamas officials had to have been involved.

The retaliatory operation was subsequently shelved, as Iran appeared to prioritize probing the extent to which its leadership was compromised by Israel.

Only two months later did Iran hit back against Israel with an October 1 missile attack that was largely thwarted by the IDF along with the armies of the US and Jordan.

Haniyeh was replaced as Hamas politburo chief by Yahya Sinwar, until then the group’s Gaza chief. Sinwar’s reign was short-lived, however, as he was killed by IDF troops in the southern Gaza city of Rafah on October 16.