UPDATED: Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh killed in Iran

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Iran on Wednesday, the Palestinian militant group Hamas and Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards said in separate statements.

The Islamist faction mourned the death of Haniyeh, who it said was killed in “a treacherous Zionist raid on his residence in Tehran”.

Iran has no intention of escalating the Middle East conflict, its first vice-president Mohammad Reza Aref said in a statement issued after the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, Iran’s state media reported on Wednesday.

The comments sit in stark contrast to the words of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Wednesday. Khamenei said that avenging Haniyeh’s assassination is “Tehran’s duty” because it occurred in the Iranian capital and that Israel had provided the grounds for “harsh punishment” for itself.

There has been no immediate comment from Israel on the strike, which took place hours after Haniyeh attended the inauguration ceremony for Iran’s new president.

Hanieh attended Iran’s new president’s swearing in ceremony on Tuesday.

“Early this morning, the residence of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran was struck, resulting in his and one of his body guards’ martyrdom. The cause is under investigation and will be announced soon,” the Revolutionary Guards said.

According to the group, Haniyeh died after participating in the inauguration ceremony of the new Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian who was sworn in on Tuesday.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps said the cause of the “incident” was not immediately clear but was “being investigated”, AFP news agency reported.

Haniyeh, 62, was a prominent member of the Hamas movement in the late 1980s.

Israel imprisoned Haniyeh for three years in 1989 as it cracked down on the first Palestinian uprising.

He was then exiled in 1992 to a no-man’s-land between Israel and Lebanon, along with a number of Hamas leaders.