Ismail Haniyeh was one of the most senior leaders of Hamas for the past two decades, in recent years running the militant group’s political operations from exile in Qatar.
Haniyeh was in Iran with other senior members of Iran’s “axis of resistance” — which includes Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Hizbullah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen — to attend the inauguration of Iran’s newly elected president when he was killed in a strike Hamas has blamed on Israel.
As Hamas’ political leader, he was central to the group’s high-stakes negotiations and diplomacy, including the stalled cease-fire deal negotiations with Israel.
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Leader of Hamas in Gaza
Haniyeh was named the leader of Hamas in Gaza in 2006. That year, he briefly served as prime minister of a Palestinian unity government, which was dissolved after months of tension that included armed conflict between Palestinian factions.
In 2017, he was named the leader of Hamas’ political bureau at a time when it was trying to soften its public image as it jockeyed for influence among Palestinians and internationally.
Haniyeh led Hamas from Qatar and Turkey in recent years. He was among the negotiators in ongoing talks between Israel and Hamas, mediated by Egypt, Qatar and the United States, to end the war in Gaza in exchange for hostages captured in the Hamas-led attack on Israel.
Ascent to Power
Haniyeh was born in 1962 in the Shati refugee camp north of Gaza City, to Palestinian parents who in 1948 had been displaced from their home in what is now Israel, in Ashkelon. He studied at schools run by the main United Nations agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, and went on to study Arabic literature at the Islamic University of Gaza.
He was arrested by the Israeli military and served several sentences in Israeli jails in the 1980s and 1990s.
His rise to power in Gaza was aided by his mentor, the spiritual leader and a founder of Hamas, Sheik Yassin, for whom he served as personal secretary. The two were targets of an attempted Israeli assassination attempt in 2003; the next year, Yassin was killed by the Israeli military.
“You don’t have to cry,” Haniyeh told a crowd gathered outside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City at the time. “You have to be steadfast, and you have to be ready for revenge.”
Wanted by the International Criminal Court
In May, the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court said he would seek an arrest warrant for Haniyeh. The prosecutor accused him and other Hamas leaders of war crimes and crimes against humanity in relation to the October 7th attack on Israel, including “extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape and sexual assault in detention.”
In June, Hamas said that Haniyeh’s sister and her family were killed in a strike by the Israeli military on the Haniyeh family home in Gaza, an assertion the military did not confirm. In April, three of Haniyeh’s 13 sons were killed by Israeli forces in another military operation in Gaza.
He was defiant in the face of the loss, a common theme in Haniyeh’s life. “We shall not give in, no matter the sacrifices,” Haniyeh said at the time, noting that he’d already lost dozens of family members in the war. – This article was first published in the New York Times