 "The story of Ismail Haniyeh, killed in Iran: From Gaza refugee camp to Hamas chief")
Ismail Haniyeh was the most wanted man in Israel. Now 10 months after the deadly 7 October attacks, the Hamas political leader is dead.
Haniyeh and his bodyguards were killed in Iran , the Palestinian militant group has announced. He died in an attack on his residence in Tehran.
Mourning the death of their leader, Hamas said in a statement that Haniyeh was killed in “a treacherous Zionist raid on his residence in Tehran”.
The 62-year-old Hamas leader was in Tehran to attend Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian’s swear-in ceremony on Tuesday. Iran gave no details on how he was killed.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the assassination but suspicion immediately fell on Israel, which has vowed to kill Haniyeh after the 7 October attacks. Israel itself did not immediately comment but it often doesn’t when it comes to assassinations carried out by their Mossad intelligence agency, reports The Associated Press.
Haniyeh’s death comes hours after Israel says it killed a senior Hezbollah commander in a strike in the Lebanese capital Beirut.
Who was Haniyeh? And how did he become one of Hamas’ most powerful leaders? We explain.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsThe early life of Haniyeh and his brush with Hamas
Haniyeh was born on January 29, 1962, in the densely populated Gaza Strip, which has been at the centre of the Israel-Palestine conflict for decades. He grew up in a refugee camp and experienced the hardships faced by Palestinians, hardening this resolve to fight for statehood. He studied at schools run by the main United Nations agency for Palestinians, UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency).
He got involved with the Islamic Student Bloc, a precursor to Hamas while studying Arabic literature at the Islamic University of Gaza in 1983. He was also involved with the radical Muslim Brotherhood and headed its student council while at the university.
Haniyeh graduated in 1987. It was the year that saw the first Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation — the First Intifada. It resulted in the founding of Hamas as an official group.
Haniyeh joined the protests against the occupation and was imprisoned for 18 days by Israeli authorities. A year later, he was jailed for six months. He was once again held in 1989 on charges that he belonged to Hamas and spent three years in prison as the Intifada gathered steam, according to a report in Al Jazeera.
Israel deported him to southern Lebanon along with other Hamas leaders after he was released. He returned to Gaza only after the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation was signed in 1993.
The rise of Haniyeh
Haniyeh was a close confidant and assistant of the late Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the co-founder of Hamas. This helped in his rise to power in the militant group.
The two were targets of an attempted assassination in 2003. Yassin was killed the next year by the Israeli military.
“You don’t have to cry,” Haniyeh told a crowd gathered outside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City back then, according to a report in The New York Times (NYT). “You have to be steadfast, and you have to be ready for revenge.”
Three years later, in 2006, he was named the leader of Hamas. He also served briefly as the prime minister of the Palestinian unity government, which was dissolved shortly following tensions between Palestinian factions and the refusal of the international community to work with Hamas. In 2007, the militant group seized control of the Gaza Strip .
While Haniyeh was dismissed as prime minister by Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, he remained the leader of the movement in Gaza.
Israel and Egypt imposed sanctions and restrictions on Gaza. In 2008, rockets were launched from Gaza to Israel and the Jewish nation only strengthened its blockade of the enclave.
However, Hamas remained in control of the region. Over the years, the group continued to fire rockets across its border into Israel, entered multiple conflicts with the Israeli forces and ramped up its military strength.
Haniyeh continued to remain at the helm. He said that he was willing to work with Western governments that showed support for Palestinians. In interviews with the Beirut-based al-Zaytouna Centre for Studies in 2013, Haniya explained that Hamas makes a distinction between political efforts and compromise. “We are not opposed to any diplomatic or political efforts to restore our rights, but we are against bargaining or exchanging our rights,” he said according to a report in Al Jazeera.
In 2017, Hamas elected him as the head of its political bureau. He lived in Gaza then and had earned a reputation for being pragmatic. “Despite his tough rhetoric, he was generally seen by analysts as moderate and pragmatic, compared to the more hardline Gaza-based leaders Mohammed Deif and Yahya Sinwar, who are believed to have masterminded last year’s shocking assault on southern Israel,” writes journalist Yolande Knell in the BBC.
In 2018, the Hamas leader was declared a terrorist by the US State Department. Haniyeh left Gaza in 2019 for a “temporary foreign tour” as per Hamas, reported The Arab Weekly. Since then, he has stayed away from the conflict-hit enclave.
In recent years, he led the group from Qatar and Turkey with his family, living a life of luxury. His wealth grew exponentially as he controlled Gaza’e economy while serving the Hamas government including through taxes imposed on goods imported into the Strip from Egypt, according to a report in The Times of Israel.
The Hamas leader reportedly had 13 children. Two of his oldest sons Moaz and Abdel Salam have been documented spending time in prestigious hotels in Doha and Istanbul. While the Hamas leader backed conservative Islam, his sons drank and partied in plush clubs with women. The family largely lived away from the harsh realities of Gaza.
Life post 7 October
After the 7 October attack , Haniyeh was one of the negotiators in talks between Israel and Hamas. In May, Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), accused Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders of war crimes and crimes against humanity linked to the 7 October attack including “extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape and sexual assault in detention.”
Since October, Israel has vowed to avenge the attack. In June, the Hamas leader’s sister and family were killed by the Israeli forces in a strike on the Haniyeh family home. In April, three of his sons were killed in an Israeli military operation in Gaza, reports NYT.
Now with the assassination of Haniyeh, Hamas has promised to punish the perpetrators. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said it would not comment and Israel has not issued an official statement.
However, the country’s heritage minister Amichay Eliyahu, a member of Israel’s far-right wrote on X that Haniyeh’s death “makes the world a better place”.
The killing comes at a tense time as confrontations between Israel and Hezbollah are escalating. Now with Hamas seething, it remains to be seen what happens next.
With inputs from agencies
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