TEHRAN: Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in an Israeli strike in Iran, was the head of Hamas’s political wing and a former Palestinian prime minister whose membership of the Islamist militant group dated back to its inception.
Hamas announced his death on Wednesday, saying in a statement: “Brother, leader, mujahid Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the movement, died in a Zionist strike on his residence in Tehran after he participated in the inauguration of the new (Iranian) president.”
Considered a pragmatist within Hamas and known for his calm demeanour, Haniyeh was born in 1963 in Gaza’s Al Shati refugee camp to a family that had to flee Ashkelon, several kilometres (miles) north of the territory, during the creation of Israel 15 years earlier.
In his youth he was a member of the student branch of the Muslim Brotherhood at the Islamic University of Gaza, and joined Hamas in 1987 when the group was founded after the outbreak of the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against Israeli occupation, which lasted until 1993.
During that time Haniyeh was imprisoned by Israel several times and then expelled to south Lebanon for six months.
In 2003, Haniyeh and Hamas’s founder and spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin survived an assassination attempt together, emerging alive from a house on which an Israeli aircraft had dropped a bomb. Yassin was killed a year later.
Student activist
As a young man, Haniyeh was a student activist at the Islamic University in Gaza City. Haniyeh became a protégé of Hamas’s founder Yassin who, like Haniyeh’s family, was a refugee from the village of Al Jura near Ashkelon in southern Israel. In 1994, he told Reuters that Yassin was a model for young Palestinians, saying: “We learned from him love of Islam and sacrifice for this Islam and not to kneel down to these tyrants and despots.”
By 2003 he was a trusted Yassin aide, photographed in Yassin’s Gaza home holding a phone to the almost completely paralyzed Hamas founder’s ear so that he could take part in a conversation.
Haniyeh was an early advocate of Hamas entering politics. In 1994, he said that forming a political party “would enable Hamas to deal with emerging developments.”
Initially overruled by the Hamas leadership, it was later approved and Haniyeh became Palestinian prime minister after the group won the Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006, a year after Israel withdrew from Gaza.
Avowedly committed to the destruction of Israel, the group took control of Gaza in a violent coup against the Palestinian Authority’s Fatah faction in 2007.
In 2012, when asked by Reuters reporters if Hamas had abandoned the armed struggle against Israel, Haniyeh replied, “Of course not” and said resistance would continue “in all forms — popular resistance, political, diplomatic and military resistance.”
Former Palestinian PM
Haniyeh was elected head of the Hamas political bureau in 2017 to succeed Khaled Meshaal, but was already a well-known figure after becoming Palestinian prime minister in 2006 following an upset victory by Hamas in that year’s parliamentary election.
However, the fragile power-sharing arrangement with the Fatah movement of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas soon ruptured, and Hamas took full control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 after violently ousting the president’s loyalists.
Haniyeh was said to have maintained good relations with the heads of the various Palestinian factions, including rivals to Hamas.
Following his death, president Abbas condemned the killing as a “cowardly act and a serious escalation”, and urged Palestinians to remain united against Israel.
More recently, Haniyeh had lived in exile and split his time between Turkey and Qatar.
In footage broadcast by Hamas-linked media after the group’s October 7 attack on Israel, Haniyeh was seen watching images on television of the unfolding assault before joining other Hamas leaders in a prayer to “thank Allah for this victory”.
The attack resulted in the deaths of 1,197 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Retaliatory military campaign
Militants also seized 251 hostages, 111 of whom are still held captive in Gaza, including 39 the military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza has killed at least 39,400 people, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, which does not provide details on civilian and militant deaths.
An Israeli strike on the Haniyeh family home in Al Shati killed 10 people in June, including his sister, civil defence officials said, while three of his sons and four of his grandchildren were also killed in an Israeli strike in April.
Haniyeh at the time said that about 60 members of his family had been killed since the war broke out.
The war has left vast swathes of Gaza in ruins and triggered a humanitarian crisis.
Haniyeh had travelled on multiple diplomatic missions since the fighting broke out.
At the time of his death, he was in Tehran to attend Tuesday’s swearing-in ceremony for President Masoud Pezeshkian. While there, he met with Pezeshkian as well as supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Following a strike in Lebanon in January that killed Hamas deputy leader Saleh al-Aruri, Haniyeh gave a televised address in which he said: “A movement whose leaders and founders fall as martyrs for the dignity of our people and our nation will never be defeated.”
