Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, killed in Iran on Wednesday, had made a name for himself in 2006 when he became Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority following his movement’s surprise victory in the legislative elections.
He was a long-standing advocate of reconciling armed and political struggle within the group, and enjoyed good relations with the leaders of the various Palestinian movements.
Until now, the sixty-year-old had lived in voluntary exile between Qatar and Turkey.
Born into a refugee family in Ashkelon (Asqalan in Arabic), a few kilometers north of Gaza, he began his militant activities within the student branch of the Muslim Brotherhood at the Islamic University of Gaza, from which Hamas emerged, before becoming a member of the Islamic University Students’ Union in 1983 and 1984.
Three years later, he joined Hamas at its creation, just as the first Intifada broke out, an uprising that lasted until 1993. During this period, Ismail Haniyeh was repeatedly imprisoned by Israel and expelled for six months to southern Lebanon.
He came to the world’s attention when he became Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority. After leading a unity government, he pledged to work towards the creation of a Palestinian State “in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with Jerusalem as its capital,” going against the official discourse of Hamas, which did not recognize these borders at the time.
But it was under his leadership that the near-civil war between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority broke out in 2007.
Deprived of its victory in the legislative elections, the Islamist movement seized power in the Gaza Strip at the cost of deadly clashes that still leave bitterness between the two rivals alive today.
The cohabitation with President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party was short-lived. Hamas forcibly ousted him from the Gaza Strip in 2007, two years after Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the territory.
Ismail Haniyeh was elected head of the Hamas political bureau in 2017 to succeed Khaled Mashaal, in exile in Qatar.
In images broadcast by Hamas media shortly after the unprecedented attack on Israel began on October 7, 2023 – during which Hamas militants abducted 251 people from Israel to the Gaza Strip – Mr. Haniyeh was seen chatting jubilantly with other Hamas leaders in his office in Doha, watching an Arab TV report showing Hamas commandos seizing Israeli army jeeps.
While more than nine months of war have left swathes of Gaza in ruins, Haniyeh has repeatedly insisted that the group would only release the hostages if the fighting ceased once and for all.
With AFP
