Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh were Israel's main Palestinian adversaries whose close links with Iran's top leadership are highlighted in videos of the slain Hamas leaders retrieved and translated by Iran International.
Sinwar, the de facto chief of Hamas and the mastermind of the October 7, 2023 attack which rocked Israel, was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza this week.
Ismail Haniyeh was his predecessor as the Iran-backed group's political chief and was killed in an explosion targeting his guesthouse in Tehran in July in a likely Israeli attack.
The two men traveled to Tehran in 2012 as part of Hamas delegation to meet Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in which their party was seen striding through an official compound alongside late senior Iranian general Qassem Soleimani.
Soleimani headed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp's elite Quds Force until he was killed in an American drone strike in Baghdad in 2020.
Following Haniyeh's assassination, Khamenei's office released footage of the 2012 audience in which Haniyeh singles out Sinwar for an introduction to the Supreme Leader, citing his two and half decades behind bars in Israel.
In a 2017 speech broadcast by Lebanese pro-Iranian TV channel Al Mayadeen, Sinwar confirmed that Soleimani had offered Hamas all means at Iran's disposal to aid their cause while offering no conditions on the group's methods.
Soleimani, Sinwar said, told him during his 2012 visit to Tehran that all capabilities would be deployed to advance the Palestinian struggle to win Jerusalem as their capital.
