Life of defiance: Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas political boss, killed

By Al Jazeera Staff

Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh has been assassinated in Tehran at the age of 62 in what the Palestinian group has described as “a treacherous Zionist raid on his residence”.

Haniyeh, who briefly served as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority’s government in 2006, was killed early on Wednesday along with a bodyguard when the house he was staying in was targeted, nearly 10 months into Israel’s war on Gaza. Haniyeh was in Tehran to attend the inauguration of Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, on Tuesday.

The Hamas leader had emerged as a major force in the Palestinian liberation movement and, like his colleagues and generations of Palestinian politicians and activists, had long been in Israel’s crosshairs. While Israel has not formally claimed responsibility for the assassination, an Israeli minister celebrated Haniyeh’s death in a post on X.

Haniyeh was born in the Shati refugee camp on the coast of Gaza City to parents displaced from Asqalan (now known as Ashkelon) when Israel was formed in 1948.

As a young man, Haniyeh was a student activist at the Islamic University in Gaza City, where he studied Arabic literature. While at university in 1983, he joined the Islamic Student Bloc, an organisation widely seen as the forerunner of Hamas.

As a Palestinian uprising broke out in December 1987 against the Israeli occupation, known as the first Intifada, Haniyeh was among the youth taking part in protests. That was also the year Hamas was founded — with Haniyeh among its younger members.

Israel imprisoned Haniyeh at least three times. After serving his longest sentence, a three-year stint, he was deported to Lebanon in 1992 along with hundreds of other members of Hamas, including senior leaders Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi and Mahmoud Zahhar, and members of other Palestinian resistance groups.

Haniyeh returned to Gaza a year later after the signing of the first Oslo Accord and became a close confidant of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Hamas’s spiritual leader and founder. After Israel released Yassin from prison in 1997, Haniyeh was appointed as his assistant.

That high profile meant that Haniyeh became a target for assassination. Israel had by then established a long pattern of killing Palestinian leaders.

Together, Haniyeh and Yassin survived an Israeli assassination attempt in September 2003 by escaping a building in Gaza City seconds before it was hit with an Israeli air strike.

However, months later, Yassin was killed by Israeli forces as he left a mosque after dawn prayers. The following month, al-Rantisi was assassinated in an Israeli helicopter missile strike on Gaza City.

“After 2003, Haniyeh gained a lot of popularity among Hamas people simply because of his stance, position and media appearances,” Hassan Barrari, analyst and professor at Qatar University, told Al Jazeera. “He remained a prominent figure until his assassination.”

Haniyeh’s stature within the Palestinian movement grew further in 2006 when Hamas ran in the Palestine legislative elections for the first time since its establishment. In a shock result, the group won the most votes, delivering a blow to Fatah and making Haniyeh the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA).

The outcome caught the United States, which had called for the elections, unprepared.

Then-New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said in leaked recordings after the elections: “I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake. And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”

Unhappy over Hamas’s central role in Palestinian governance, Western governments halted aid to the PA, placing the body under severe financial strain. The US and many other Western governments view Hamas as a “terrorist” organisation.

Amid Western pressure and heightened tensions between Hamas and Fatah, PA President Mahmoud Abbas dismissed Haniyeh and dissolved his government. This resulted in an independent Hamas-led government in Gaza in 2007, headed by Haniyeh.

As Hamas took over the government of Gaza, Israel, in cooperation with neighbouring Egypt, imposed a siege on the enclave, which has continued for 17 years. “This siege should not break our will and should not turn this conflict into an internal Palestinian conflict, and that conflict should be against the parties that imposed the siege against the Palestinian people,” Haniyeh said in a news briefing in 2006.

Appointed as head of Hamas’s political bureau in 2017 and replacing Khaled Meshal, Haniyeh led Hamas’s diplomacy from a number of locations, including Turkey and the Qatari capital, Doha. He served as a negotiator in ceasefire talks or engaged in talks with Iran, a key supporter of Palestinian liberation.

“Haniyeh was a political figure and a pragmatic one,” Palestinian political analyst Nour Odeh told Al Jazeera. “He was known for maintaining very positive relations with Palestinian leaders from all factions.”

After the October 7 attacks on southern Israel, the government of Israel made it clear that senior Hamas leaders were in effect on its hit list. Many of Haniyeh’s close relatives have been killed in Gaza since then.

In April, three of his sons were killed in an Israeli air strike that struck their vehicle. Four of his grandchildren were also killed – three girls and a boy. In all, Haniyeh said, 60 of his relatives have been killed in the past 10 months.

“All our people and all the families of Gaza residents have paid a heavy price with the blood of their children, and I am one of them,” he said in an interview.

That sentiment will remain one of Haniyeh’s lasting legacies, said Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer and analyst who served as a legal adviser to the Palestinian team negotiating with Israel from 2000 to 2005. “He will be known for demanding freedom and for his strength even as his family was being hunted down,” Buttu said.

Haniyeh’s assassination marks the latest killing of a senior Hamas leader. Most recently, senior Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri was killed in January in an Israeli drone strike in Beirut.

But Barrari said Israeli assassinations have “never finished Hamas” in the past and wouldn’t now.

“It’s not like Israel is fighting a mafia. These people represent Palestinian resistance,” he said.

Source: Al Jazeera