They killed him in his sleep, at two in the morning, a missile on the bedroom of the “residence” where he slept in Tehran. This, at least, is the version that the Pasdaran have leaked of the assassination in Iran of the political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyehthe highest-level political/military assassination carried out so far in the Iranian capital under the eyes of the main sponsors and supporters of the Palestinian armed group.
Israel does not comment, but everything suggests that its signature is behind the elimination of the one who was, in the last two decades, one of the top leaders of the Palestinian Islamist movement, political ambassador and military leader as needed, ambiguous in his positions, until the end. After October 7, which he celebrated and blessed, he led negotiations with Israel for the first agreement on the hostages in Gaza, and was leading negotiations for a second agreement. But he always did so by continuing to reiterate that the “blood of the Palestinians” was necessary for the “cause”.
He was the man of the alliance with Tehran: in 2020 he participated in the funeral of the martyred general Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Quds force of the Guardians of the Revolution, publicly sanctioning what intelligence and analysts had known for some time, the definitive passage of Hamas, a Sunni movement, under the influence of Shiite Iran.
Born in 1962 in al Shati camp, Gaza, he studied in UNRWA schools and graduated in Arabic literature from the Islamic University of Gaza. He was in and out of Israeli prisons between the 1980s and 1990s, a cursus honorum sealed in the blessing to leadership received from his mentor, the spiritual leader and founder of Hamas, Sheik Yassin, of whom he was personal secretary.
In 2003, Israelis unsuccessfully attempted to kill both of them. The following year, Yassin was eliminated. “You must not cry,” Haniyeh told a crowd of followers outside al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. “Prepare for revenge.” He was named Hamas’s leader in the Strip in 2006 and briefly led a unity government that was engulfed in violence in a coup by Hamas itself, which had won the 2006 elections in Gaza but had eliminated Fatah rivals from the Strip by force.
In 2017, he replaced Khaled Meshal as head of the Hamas politburo, and Yahya Sinwar succeeded him as head of the group in Gaza. Haniyeh had to leave the Strip, settling between Qatar, in Doha, where Hamas still has its political headquarters, and Erdogan’s Turkey, with whom he shares a common closeness to the Muslim Brotherhood. Since then, he has been the political leader and representative abroad of Hamas, accused by many Palestinians of living a comfortable and wealthy life in the Qatari capital. When the Americans left Afghanistan, he called Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar to congratulate him on the end of the US presence in the country.
In October 2022, he met Assad, the first public rapprochement between Hamas and Syria since Hamas severed ties with the Syrian dictator by siding with the opposition – the Islamist one, not the secular and democratic one – during the civil war. Since January 2020, after the killing of Soleimani, his visits to Tehran had become frequent. Yesterday, Haniyeh was in the Iranian capital to attend the inauguration ceremony of the new Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian. He had met the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, along with emissaries from Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, one of the many summits that the Axis of Resistance has held in Tehran in these months of war under the protection of the Ayatollah. Until two in the morning this morning.
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– 2024-07-31 05:54:57
