Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran this Wednesday, with suspicions immediately falling on Israel for being responsible for the act of terror.
Although no one has yet claimed responsibility for the assassination of Haniyeh, the move is in line with Israel’s policy of physically eliminating top leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah especially since the start of the war in Gaza on October last year. Israel has chosen to still remain silent about the assassination act as no official statement has yet been published by any Israel authority to address the incident.
But what also links this assassination act to Israel is that the Israeli officials have vowed on several occasions to assassinate Haniyeh and other Hamas and Hezbollah leaders especially since the onset of the Gaza war.
Haniyeh was in Tehran to attend Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s swear-in ceremony on Tuesday. In the early hours of Wednesday, he and one of his bodyguards were killed after the building where they were staying was struck reportedly by a short-ranged missile carried by a drone.
Who was Ismail Haniyeh?
Born on May 1963, Ismail Haniyeh was the chairman of the Political Bureau of Hamas. He lived in Qatar for nearly 10 years.
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.
Haniyeh was arrested several times by the Israelis since 1980s. 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. 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 1996 he returned to Gaza and was quickly chosen to head the office of the movement’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Yassin, in 1997. In 2006, when the Palestinian Authority held parliamentary elections in the West Bank and Gaza, Haniyeh was the Parliamentary leader of Hamas.
Back then. Hamas could secure a victory in the election and Haniyeh became the ‘Prime Minister of the State of Palestine’. However, due to rising tensions between Fatah, the party of President Mahmoud Abbas, and Hamas, Abbas decided to dissolve the Hamas government in 2007. Haniyeh did not accept his decree and continued to rule from Gaza, while Fatah ran the authority in the West Bank.
Haniyeh stepped down as the Hamas leader in Gaza in 2017, giving his place to Yahya Sinwar. In the same year, Haniyeh was appointed the chairman of Hamas’s Political Bureau, replacing Khaled Meshal. He held the office until his assassination in Tehran this Wednesday.
Haniyeh lost three sons in an Israeli airstrike
Three of Haniyeh’s sons – Hazem, Amir and Mohammad – were killed on April 10 when Israeli carried out an airstrike in Gaza. Haniyeh also lost four of his grandchildren, three girls and a boy, in the same attack.
Denying Israeli assertions that his sons were fighters for Hamas, Haniyeh said back then that “the interests of the Palestinian people are placed ahead of everything” when asked if their killing would impact truce talks between Israel and Hamas.
Haniyeh had a major impact on building up Hamas’ fighting capacity during the decade in which he was Hamas’ top leader in Gaza.
