31 July 2024|24 Muharram 1446
Hamas Leader Ismail Haniyeh and one of his bodyguards were assassinated at their Tehran residence early on Wednesday, according to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
Hamas and Iranian officials have confirmed that Haniyeh was killed during an Israeli raid targeting his home in the Iranian capital. According to reports, the attack took place at about 2 am local time at a special residence for military veterans in the north of the city.
The attack has been condemned by Turkey and Russia, with Ankara labeling it “heinous” and Moscow calling it “an absolutely unacceptable political murder.” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has also condemned the assassination, describing it as a cowardly act and a dangerous development.
Who is Ismail Haniyeh?
Ismail Haniyeh was the tough-talking face of the Palestinian resistance group’s international diplomacy as Israel’s war raged back in Gaza, where three of his sons were killed in an Israeli airstrike.
Appointed to the Hamas top job in 2017, Haniyeh moved between Turkey and Qatar’s capital Doha, escaping the travel curbs of blockaded Gaza. This enabled him to act as a negotiator in ceasefire talks or to talk to Iran.
“All the agreements of normalization that you (Arab states) signed with (Israel) will not end this conflict,” Haniyeh declared on Qatar-based Al Jazeera television shortly after Hamas fighters launched the October 7 raid.
How Haniyeh entered politics
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 in 1987. He was arrested and briefly deported.
Haniyeh built a close relationship with 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 the Reuters news agency that Yassin was a model for young Palestinians, saying: “We learned from his 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 paralyzed Hamas founder’s ear so that he could take part in a conversation. Yassin was assassinated by Israel in 2004.
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.” Initially overruled by the Hamas leadership, it was later approved, and Haniyeh became Palestinian prime minister after the group won Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006, a year after Israel’s military withdrew from Gaza. The group took control of Gaza in 2007.
In 2012, when asked by reporters if Hamas had abandoned the armed struggle against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, Haniyeh replied, “Of course, not,” and said resistance would continue “in all forms – popular resistance, political, diplomatic and military resistance.”
‘Political and diplomatic front of Hamas’
When Haniyeh left Gaza in 2017, he 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.
Children and grandchildren killed in Israeli airstrike
Haniyeh lost about 60 members of his family who had been killed since Israel’s war on Gaza started on October 7. Three of Haniyeh’s sons – Hazem, Amir, and Mohammad – were killed on April 10 when an Israeli airstrike struck the car they were driving, Hamas said.
Haniyeh also lost four of his grandchildren, three girls, and a boy, in the attack.
When asked if their killing would impact truce talks,Haniyeh said, “The interests of the Palestinian people are placed ahead of everything.”
“If the criminal enemy thinks that targeting my family will make us change our position and affect our resistance, then he is deluding himself because every martyr in Gaza and Palestine is from my family.”
“The blood of our martyrs demands that we do not compromise, that we do not change, that we do not weaken, but that we continue on our path with determination.”
A timeless quote from the martyr leader Ismail Haniyeh:
“We feel the heavy burden and responsibility of the Palestinian cause. This responsibility comes with a price, and we are ready to pay that price: martyrdom for the sake of Allah Almighty, then for Palestine and for the dignity of this Ummah.”
