With the killing of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas has lost its most important leader outside the Gaza Strip. Haniyeh was part of the terrorist organization for decades.
In the ongoing war with Israel in the Gaza Strip, he played a key role in negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of hostages with Israel through the mediators Qatar, Egypt and the USA. Haniyeh was 62 years old.
He was born in 1962 in the Shati (“beach”) refugee camp in Gaza. He grew up in poverty. His parents had been expelled from Askalan, which is now known as the Israeli town of Ashkelon.
After graduating from school, Haniyeh studied Arabic literature. He joined Hamas in the late 1980s during the first Intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation. In the years that followed, he served several prison sentences in Israeli prisons, returning to Gaza in 1993.
He soon made a name for himself as a close confidant of Hamas spiritual leader Ahmed Yassin, who was killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike in 2004. After Hamas’ victory over the rival Palestinian Fatah movement in the 2006 elections, he briefly served as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority.
Haniyeh had become a political leader and was soon placed on the US list of terrorists operating worldwide. Since 2017, he has headed the political bureau of Hamas – since 2019 from exile in Qatar, where he lived with part of his family. In April this year, three of his sons and four of his grandchildren were killed in an Israeli air strike in Gaza.
Shift in power to Sinwar
Israel held him partly responsible for the Hamas terror attack on October 7, which led to the Gaza war, and had announced that it would eliminate the entire Hamas leadership.
Within Hamas, Haniyeh was seen as a more realistic voice. He was considered more moderate than Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, whose power had grown noticeably in recent years.
