Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, killed Wednesday in Iran, became known to the world in 2006 when he became prime minister of the Palestinian Authority after his movement’s surprise victory in the legislative elections.
He had long advocated reconciling armed struggle and political combat within the group and maintained good relations with the leaders of the various Palestinian movements.
The sixty-year-old had been living in voluntary exile between Qatar and Turkey until now.
Born into a refugee family from Ashkelon (Asqalan in Arabic), a few kilometers north of Gaza, he began his activist 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’s student union in 1983 and 1984.
Three years later, he joined Hamas at its creation, when the first Intifada broke out, an uprising that would last until 1993. During this period, Ismail Haniyeh was imprisoned several times by Israel and expelled for six months to southern Lebanon.
He came to international attention in 2006 when he became prime minister of the Palestinian Authority after his movement’s surprise victory in the legislative elections.
After taking the head of a unity government, he had committed to working towards the creation of a Palestinian state “in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with Jerusalem as its capital”, going against the official discourse of Hamas which, at the time, did not recognise these borders.
But it was under his leadership that the quasi-civil war between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority broke out in 2007. Deprived of its victory in the legislative elections, the Islamist movement took power in the Gaza Strip at the cost of deadly clashes that still leave bitter resentment between the two rivals alive today.
Your jubilant tone
But cohabitation with Fatah, the party of President Mahmoud Abbas, was short-lived. Hamas ousted him by force from the Gaza Strip in 2007, two years after Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the territory.
Ismail Haniyeh was elected head of Hamas’ political bureau in 2017 to succeed Khaled Meshaal, who is in exile in Qatar.
In footage released by Hamas media shortly after the bloody attack on Israel began, Mr Haniyeh can be seen jubilantly chatting with other Hamas leaders in his office in Doha, watching an Arab TV report showing Hamas commandos seizing Israeli army jeeps.
With more than nine months of war leaving swathes of Gaza in ruins, Haniyeh has repeatedly insisted the group would only release the hostages if the fighting stopped for good.