“They are living on borrowed time,” Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said after the October 7 attack by Hamas, referring to the leadership of the Islamist militant group. There’s a poster hanging on the wall of his office in Tel Aviv, according to reports, showing faces of Hamas including Ismail Haniyeh, the chairman of the Political Bureau of Hamas, who was living in exile in Qatar in recent years.
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On Tuesday, Haniyeh was in Tehran to participate in the inauguration of Iran’s new President Masoud Pezeshkian. He was seen in photographs with Iranian leaders. On Wednesday morning, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps issued a statement saying Haniyeh and his Iranian bodyguard were killed in a raid by the “Zionist entity”, referring to Israel. Hamas also issued a statement saying Haniyeh was killed in a raid at his residence in Tehran. Details of the circumstances of his assassination are still awaited.
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Haniyeh was seen as the overall leader of Hamas (though it was not clear how much authority he could exercise over Hamas in Gaza). Like Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza, Haniyeh was also involved with Hamas’s radical operations in the late 1980s and got arrested several times by the Israelis.
After he was released from jail in 1992, Israel exiled him, along with a group of other Hamas leaders, to a no-man’s land in southern Lebanon. A year later, he returned to Gaza. His quick rise within Hamas would begin after he was chosen to head the office of the movement’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Shmed Yassin, in 1997. Sheikh Yassin, a quadriplegic and nearly blind, was killed by an Israeli strike in March 2004.
In 2006, when the Palestinian Authority held parliamentary elections in the West Bank and Gaza, Haniyeh was the Parliamentary leader of Hamas. He led the Islamist group to a surprising victory and became the ‘Prime Minister of the State of Palestine’. But the Palestine Authority’s financial backers in the West refused to accept a Hamas-led government. Nor did Israel. Fatah, the party of Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, was also upset by Hamas’s victory.
As tensions between Fatah and Hamas emerged, President Abbas dissolved the Hamas government led by Haniyeh in 2007. Haniyeh did not accept Abbas’s decree and continued to rule from Gaza, his stronghold, while Fatah ran the Palestine Authority in the West Bank.
Haniyeh stepped down as the Hamas leader in Gaza in 2017, paving the way for Sinwar’s rise. In the same year, Haniyeh was appointed the chairman of Hamas’s Political Bureau, taking over from Khaled Meshal. By 2018, he relocated to Qatar and established an office in Doha. From the Qatari capital, he led the political operations of Hamas – until his death in Tehran.
Israel has neither acknowledged nor rejected Iran’s claim that it was behind the assassination of Haniyeh. Israel usually keeps mum on such operations in hostile territories. While Iran is investigating the incident, the killing of the Hamas chief in its capital, immediately after the inauguration of its new President, would be seen as a major embarrassment for the Islamic Republic.
Sons killed in airstrike
Three of Haniyeh’s sons - Hazem, Amir and Mohammad - were killed on April 10 when an Israeli air strike struck the car they were driving, Hamas said. Haniyeh also lost four of his grandchildren, three girls and a boy, in the attack, Hamas said.
Haniyeh had denied Israeli assertions that his sons were fighters for the group, and said “the interests of the Palestinian people are placed ahead of everything” when asked if their killing would impact truce talks.
For all the tough language in public, Arab diplomats and officials had viewed him as relatively pragmatic compared with more hardline voices inside Gaza, where the military wing of Hamas planned the October 7 attack.
While telling Israel’s military they would find themselves “drowning in the sands of Gaza”, he and his predecessor as Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, had shuttled around the region for talks over a Qatari-brokered ceasefire deal with Israel that would include exchanging hostages for Palestinians in Israeli jails as well as more aid for Gaza.
Israel regards the entire Hamas leadership as terrorists, and has accused Haniyeh, Meshaal and others of continuing to “pull the strings of the Hamas terror organisation”.
But how much Haniyeh knew about the October 7 assault beforehand is not clear. The plan, drawn up by the Hamas military council in Gaza, was such a closely guarded secret that some Hamas officials seemed shocked by its timing and scale.
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Yet Haniyeh, a Sunni Muslim, had a major hand building up Hamas’ fighting capacity, partly by nurturing ties with Shi’ite Muslim Iran, which makes no secret of its support for the group.
During the decade in which Haniyeh was Hamas’ top leader in Gaza, Israel accused his leadership team of helping to divert humanitarian aid to the group’s military wing. Hamas denied it.
Shuttle diplomacy
When he left Gaza in 2017, Haniyeh was succeeded by Yahya Sinwar, a hardliner who spent more than two decades in Israeli prisons and whom Haniyeh had welcomed back to Gaza in 2011 after a prisoner exchange.
“Haniyeh is leading the political battle for Hamas with Arab governments,” Adeeb Ziadeh, a specialist in Palestinian affairs at Qatar University, said before his death, adding that he had close ties with more hardline figures in the group and the military wing. “He is the political and diplomatic front of Hamas,” Ziadeh said.
Haniyeh and Meshaal had met officials in Egypt, which has also had a mediation role in the ceasefire talks. Haniyeh travelled in early November to Tehran to meet Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iranian state media reported.
When did Haniyeh joined Hamas?
Three senior officials told Reuters that Khamenei had told the Hamas leader in that meeting that Iran would not enter the war having not been told about it in advance. Hamas did not respond to requests for comment before Reuters published its report, and then issued a denial after its publication.
As a young man, Haniyeh was a student activist at the Islamic University in Gaza City. He joined Hamas when it was created in the First Palestinian intifada (uprising) in 1987. He was arrested and briefly deported.
Haniyeh became a protégé of Hamas’ founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, who like Haniyeh’s family, was a refugee from the village of Al Jura near Ashkelon. 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 paralysed Hamas founder’s ear so that he could take part in a conversation. Yassin was assassinated by Israel in 2004.
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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”.
In 2012, when asked by Reuters reporters if Hamas had abandoned the armed struggle, Haniyeh replied “of course not” and said resistance would continue “in all forms - popular resistance, political, diplomatic and military resistance”.
(With inputs from Reuters)
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