The leader of the Palestinian group Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, met Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during a visit to Tehran in recent days.

A Hamas official reveled the news about the meeting on Saturday in remarks broadcast by al-Mayadeen television affiliated with the Iranian regime.

Osama Hamdan, a senior official in the Iran-backed Hamas, gave no further details about the visit to Tehran, speaking in Beirut. However Iranian official media was silent about the meeting on Saturday.

Haniyeh has resided between Qatar and Turkey since 2019. Both countries are close supporters of Hamas, with Qatar providing hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the militant Islamist group.

However, Khamenei and his Islamic regime in Tehran have been the main military backers of Hamas, providing weapons and training through their network of militant proxy forces in the region, including the Lebanese Hezbollah. However, the Iranian regime has so far stopped short of direct involvement in the Israel-Hamas conflict.

The United States has deployed two powerful naval strike groups led by large aircraft carriers in the eastern Mediterranean, in addition to reinforcing its presence in the Persian Gulf in the summer.

Haniyeh had already met with Iran’s foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian in Qatar on October 31.