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DUBAI.- Ismail Haniye, al Hamas leader assassinated in Iranwas the harsh image of the international diplomacy of the Palestinian terrorist group while war raged in Gaza, where three of her sons were killed in an Israeli airstrike.
But despite the rhetoric, Many diplomats considered him a moderate. compared to the more radical members of the Iran-backed group inside Gaza.
Appointed Hamas’s top official in 2017, Haniye moved between Türkiye and Doha, the capital of Qatarescaping travel restrictions from the blockaded Gaza Strip and allowing it to act as a negotiator in ceasefire talks or speak with Hamas ally Iran.
“All the normalization agreements that you [los Estados árabes] signed [con Israel] “They will not end this conflict,” Haniyeh told Qatar’s Al Jazeera television shortly after Hamas fighters launched the Oct. 7 attack, which killed 1,200 people in Israel, according to Israeli counts, and took about 250 others hostage in Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on the planet.
Ismail HaniyehAFP – Iranian Presidency
Israel’s response to the attack has been a military campaign that has so far killed more than 39,000 people inside Gaza and bombed much of the enclave into rubble, according to health authorities there.
In May, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor requested arrest warrants against three Hamas leaders, including Haniyeh, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for alleged war crimes. Israeli and Palestinian leaders have rejected the charges.
Hamas’s 1988 founding charter called for the destruction of Israel, although its leaders have occasionally offered a long-term truce with Israel in exchange for a viable Palestinian state on all Palestinian territory occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. Israel regards this as a ruse. Hamas also sent suicide bombers into Israel in the 1990s and 2000s.
Three of Haniye’s sons – Hazem, Amir and Mohammad – were killed on April 10 when an Israeli airstrike hit the car they were driving.according to Hamas. Haniye also lost four of her grandchildren, three girls and a boy, in the attack, according to Hamas.
Haniyeh’s three sons killed in Gaza
Haniyeh had denied Israeli claims that his sons were fighters with the group and said “the interests of the Palestinian people are above all else” when asked if his death would affect truce talks.
“All our people and all the families of the inhabitants of Gaza have paid a heavy price with the blood of their children and I am one of them,” he said, adding that at least 60 members of his family were killed in the war.
However, despite his harsh language in public, Arab diplomats and officials viewed him as relatively pragmatic compared to the more hardline voices inside Gaza.where Hamas’s military wing planned the October 7 attack.
As he told the Israeli military it would find itself “drowning in the sands of Gaza,” he and his predecessor as Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, had traveled around the region for talks on a Qatari-brokered ceasefire deal with Israel that would include an exchange of hostages for Palestinians in Israeli jails as well as more aid for Gaza.
Israel considers all Hamas leaders to be “terrorists” and has accused Haniyeh, Meshaal and others of continuing to “pull the strings of the Hamas terrorist organization.”
Ismail Haniyeh, Palestinian leader of the militant group Hamas, surrounded by lawmakers, makes the victory sign during the swearing-in ceremony of the new Iranian president, at the parliament in Tehran on July 30, 2024AFP – AFP
But It is unclear how much Haniyeh knew in advance about the October 7 assault. The plan, drawn up by Hamas’s military council in Gaza, was such a closely guarded secret that some Hamas officials seemed surprised by its timing and scale.
However, Haniye, the Sunni Muslim, had a lot to do with the development of Hamas’s fighting capacityin part by fostering ties with Shiite Muslim Iran, which makes no secret of its support for the group.
During the decade that Haniyeh was Hamas’ top leader in Gaza, Israel accused his leadership of helping divert humanitarian aid to the group’s military wing. Hamas denied this.
When he left Gaza in 2017, Haniye He was succeeded by Yahya Sinwara radical who spent more than two decades in Israeli prisons and whom Haniyeh had welcomed back to Gaza in 2011 following a prisoner exchange.
“Haniye is leading Hamas’s political battle with Arab governments,” Adeeb Ziadeh, a Palestinian affairs specialist at Qatar University, said before his death, adding that he maintained close ties with hardline figures in the group and its military wing.
“He is the political and diplomatic front of Hamas”Ziadeh said.
Haniyeh and Meshaal had met with officials in Egypt, which has also played a mediating role in the ceasefire talks. Haniyeh traveled to Tehran in early November to meet with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to Iranian state media reports.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei meet in Tehran in June
Three senior officials told Reuters that Khamenei had told the Hamas leader at that meeting that Iran would not enter the war if it had not been informed of it in advance.Hamas did not respond to requests for comment before Reuters published its article and then issued a denial after its publication.
As a young woman, Haniye was student activist at the Islamic University in Gaza City. He joined Hamas when it was created during the First Palestinian Intifada (uprising) in 1987. He was arrested and briefly deported.
Haniye became a protégé of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmad Yasin, who, like Haniye’s family, was a refugee from the village of al-Jura near Ashkelon. In 1994, he told Reuters that Yassin was a role model for young Palestinians: “We learned from him the love of Islam and sacrifice for this Islam and not to kneel before these tyrants and despots.”
By 2003 he was already a trusted aide to Yassin, pictured in his Gaza home holding a telephone to the almost completely paralysed Hamas founder’s ear so he could take part in a conversation. Yassin was assassinated by Israel in 2004.
Haniye fue one of the first advocates of Hamas’ entry into politicsIn 1994 he said that forming a political party “would enable Hamas to cope with new developments.”
Hamas’s leadership initially rejected it but later approved it and Haniyeh became Palestinian prime minister after the group won Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006, a year after the Israeli military withdrew from Gaza.
The group took control of Gaza in 2007.
In 2012, when asked by Reuters reporters whether Hamas had abandoned armed struggle, Haniyeh replied “of course not” and said resistance would continue “in all its forms: popular resistance, political resistance, diplomatic resistance and military resistance.”
Por Samia Nakhoul y Stephen Farrell
ReutersConocé The Trust Project
