Ismail Haniyeh, who has been killed in the Iranian capital of Tehran aged 61, was the chief of the political bureau of the Palestinian organisation Hamas. He had just attended the inauguration of Iran’s newly elected president when the state guesthouse he was staying in was hit by an explosion.
Though Israel did not claim the attack, it was widely believed to have been responsible. Jerusalem blamed Haniyeh for the terror attack led by the Islamist group on 7 October last year, in which around 1,200 people were killed, and another 250 taken as hostages.
Ever since, Israel has fought against Hamas in Gaza, a conflict in which tens of thousands of people have been killed, and about 1.9 million displaced.
Haniyeh came to international attention in January 2006 when he organised the defeat of the Fatah movement in Palestinian legislative council elections. In 1996 Hamas had boycotted the PLC poll to choose a government for the Palestinian Authority (PA), which represents Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. In 2006, however, local Hamas figures campaigned as the Change and Reform list.
As their first-placed candidate, Haniyeh downplayed Hamas’s theocratic beliefs and instead echoed grievances against PA nepotism and autocracy. Hamas also claimed credit for Israeli settlers and soldiers leaving the Gaza Strip in August 2005. Haniyeh’s list defeated Fatah by 76 seats to 43.
Surprised by their success, party members seemed unready for power. Haniyeh tried to rule jointly with Fatah as the PA’s prime minister. But the coalition never crystallised. In June 2006 renegade Palestinian commandos killed two Israeli soldiers and kidnapped a third, Gilad Shalit. Israel promptly invaded Gaza and fought there for five months, destroying power stations, and jailing nearly a quarter of PLC legislators, including six Hamas ministers.
Jerusalem also bombed Haniyeh’s empty office. He offered to resign to lessen public suffering, but rejected the call from Mahmoud Abbas, president of the PA, for Hamas to surrender weapons. Twice in 2006 assailants fired on Haniyeh’s convoy as he re-entered Gaza from Egypt, after fundraising trips to the Gulf. His ideological stance hardened. “We will never recognise the usurper Zionist government and will continue our jihad-like movement until Jerusalem’s liberation,” he said.
In March 2007 Abbas reappointed Haniyeh prime minister after the two signed a reconciliation accord in Mecca. Within three months, Hamas forces violently purged Gaza of Fatah officials. After endorsing the coup, in June 2007 Haniyeh was fired by Abbas, refused to recognise his successor, and Palestine split into two antagonistic entities.
Three weeks later Haniyeh regained status by appearing on television with the BBC journalist Alan Johnston, whom he had helped free from kidnappers.
Burly and genial in demeanour, Haniyeh became in effect premier of Gaza alone. He hinted at extending a truce with Israel, eschewed “global terror”, equated Hamas with America’s 1776 revolutionaries, and even gave interviews to Israeli television.
Yet Haniyeh still refused demands from the US, Europe, Israel and the Arab League to recognise Israel, disarm Hamas’s military wing, or abide by agreements signed by the PLO. As a result, his regime faced immediate diplomatic and economic boycott.
Israel barred Gazan legislators from attending assembly sessions in Ramallah on the West Bank. Europe and the US called Hamas a “prohibited terrorist group” and sent aid directly to the PA presidency and NGOs. Poverty and joblessness rocketed. In 2008, doctors, teachers and police went on strike over unpaid salaries.
Haniyeh also faced rivals within Hamas, such as Khaled Meshaal, head of the uncompromising Damascus-based politburo, and the military chief Mohammed Deif, killed last month.
Later the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told allies that Israel had to support Hamas so as to weaken Abbas. It appears that Haniyeh accepted Israeli-approved Qatari funds as ruler of Gaza from 2007 to 2016, and later as the Hamas leader based in Doha, the capital of Qatar. Meanwhile he allowed rockets from Hamas’s Qassam military wing to hit Israel; Gaza in turn continued to suffer from harsh Israeli reprisal operations.
Haniyeh’s early life hardly promised future power and wealth. He was born in the overcrowded Shati (Beach) refugee camp in the Gaza Stgrip. Like Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder of Hamas, Haniyeh’s parents were forced to flee from Jura, a village near Ashkelon, during the 1948 war. Ismail was four when Israel defeated Egypt and occupied Gaza in the six-day war of 1967.
A keen footballer and devout Muslim, Haniyeh graduated from a UNWRA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) school and then studied Arabic literature at the Islamic University in Gaza from 1981. In 1985-86 he headed the student council and joined Hamas, founded shortly after the first intifada began in December 1987. Hamas emerged from local branches of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which Israel initially favoured as a counterweight to the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). The name Hamas spells the Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement and means “zeal”.
Jailed by Israel three times after 1989, Haniyeh was released in early 1992, and deported to Lebanon along with 415 fellow Hamas activists. While there, they learned suicide bombing techniques from Hezbollah, which they used against Israeli civilians from 1994 onwards. Eventually Haniyeh returned to Gaza, gained a doctorate, chaired Gaza’s Islamic Society Club and became dean of the Islamic University.
Hamas rejected the Oslo accords of 1993 and accused Yassir Arafat, historic head of Fatah and the PLO, of colluding with the “Zionist enemy”. Nonetheless Haniyeh enhanced his reputation as a pragmatist after 1994 by running a bureau that liaised with Fatah and other secular nationalists. Though popular with Hamas rank and file, he was held back by his youth and lack of military expertise – until Mossad tried to assassinate Meshaal in Amman in 1997. That incident led Jordan to force Israel to free Yassin from jail. Back in Gaza, Yassin chose Haniyeh as his bureau chief, responsible for Hamas-run social and health amenities.
PA forces arrested Haniyeh in December 2001, during the second intifada, but soon freed him. Next, Israel put him on their “targeted killing” list after a bus bomb killed 23 people in August 2003. In early 2004 Israel assassinated first Yassin and then his heir, Abdel Aziz Rantisi.
Thanks to Haniyeh’s success in organising elections, he overtook Rantisi’s expected successor, the hardliner Mahmoud al-Zahar, to become Hamas leader in Gaza. His capital rose after the 2006 election victory and a Cairo-brokered ceasefire with Israel in 2008. Shalit’s release in 2011 in exchange for 1,027 Israeli-held Palestinians increased Hamas’s popularity in the West Bank.
Yet the International Crisis Group said Palestinians were tiring of “principles over bread”, given economic hardship, plus Hamas harassment of civilians and enforcement of religious laws in Gaza. Meanwhile the Israeli press reported that Haniyeh became a millionaire by levying a 20% tax on goods passing through smuggling tunnels.
In 2016 Haniyeh left Gaza, and the following year replaced Meshaal as head of the Hamas politburo in Doha. Haniyeh’s promotion was seen as a swing towards Iran; Meshaal, by contrast, had favoured ties with Turkey and a generally more Sunni, Arab stance.
An existing rift widened between Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar, his successor in Gaza. Sinwar and Deif apparently planned the 7 October operation without informing him. Power had shifted away from the Qatar set, whose lifestyle offended many.
Even so, Israel’s killing of three of Haniyeh’s sons in April boosted his standing within the movement. He persistently defended the 7 October attack, while shuttling between Cairo, Istanbul and Doha as chief negotiator for a ceasefire deal.
Haniyeh is survived by his wife, Amal, with whom he had had 13 children.