Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader killed in Iran, was the tough face of the Palestinian group’s international diplomacy while the war was raging in Gaza, where three of his sons were killed in Israeli air strikes.
But despite the rhetoric, many diplomats saw him as a moderate compared to more hardline members of the Iran-backed group inside Gaza.
After being appointed to Hamas’ top post in 2017, Haniyeh shuttled between Turkey and the Qatari capital Doha, allowing him to escape travel restrictions to the blockaded Gaza Strip and act as a negotiator in ceasefire talks or talk to Hamas’ ally Iran.
Shortly after Hamas fighters launched their assault on October 7, Haniya declared on Qatar-based Al Jazeera television, “Whatever normalisation agreements you (Arab states) have signed (with Israel) will not end this conflict.”
The attack sparked a military operation by Israel that has so far killed more than 35,000 people in Gaza, according to health officials in the region.
Sons killed in airstrike
Hamas said three of Haniyeh’s sons – Hazem, Amir and Mohammed – were killed on April 10 when an Israeli airstrike hit their car. Haniyeh also lost four of her grandchildren, three girls and a boy, in the attack, Hamas said.
Haniyeh had denied Israeli claims that his sons were fighters for the group, and when asked if their killing would impact ceasefire talks, he said “the interests of the Palestinian people take precedence over everything else.”
Despite his harsh language in public, Arab diplomats and officials regarded him as relatively pragmatic compared with more radical voices inside Gaza, where Hamas’s military wing planned the October 7 attack.
He told Israeli forces they would find themselves “sinking in the sand of Gaza”, and his predecessor, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, travelled around the region to negotiate a ceasefire deal with Israel brokered by Qatar that included a hostage swap for Palestinians held in Israeli jails and increased aid for Gaza.
Israel considers the entire Hamas leadership to be terrorists, and has accused Haniyeh, Meshaal and others of “continuing to support the Hamas terrorist organization.”
But how much Haniyeh knew about the October 7 attack in advance is unclear. The plan, drawn up by the Hamas Military Council in Gaza, was kept so secret that some Hamas officials were surprised by its timing and scale.
Still, the Sunni Muslim Haniyya played a key role in boosting Hamas’s fighting capabilities, in part by fostering ties with Shi’ite 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 team of helping funnel humanitarian aid to the group’s military wing. Hamas denies this.
Shuttle Diplomacy
When he left Gaza in 2017, Haniyeh was replaced by Yahya Sinwar, a hardliner who had spent more than two decades in Israeli prisons and whom Haniyeh had welcomed to Gaza in 2011 after a prisoner exchange.
“Haniyeh was leading the political battle for Hamas with Arab governments,” Adib Ziadeh, a Palestinian affairs expert at Qatar University, said before his death. He also said he had close ties to hard-liners in the group and its military wing.
“He is the political and diplomatic front of Hamas,” Ziadeh said.
Haniyeh and Meshaal met officials in Egypt, which has also played a mediating role in the ceasefire talks. Iranian state media reported that Haniyeh travelled to Tehran in early November to meet Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Three senior officials told Reuters that Khamenei told the Hamas leader at that meeting that Iran would not join the war because it had not been told about it in advance. Hamas did not respond to requests for comment before Reuters published its report and then declined to do so after its publication.
As a young man, Haniyeh was a student activist at the Islamic University in Gaza City. He joined the first Palestinian intifada (uprising) when Hamas was formed in 1987. He was arrested and briefly exiled.
Haniyeh became a disciple of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who like Haniyeh’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, saying: “We learned from him the love of Islam and to make sacrifices for this Islam and not to bow down to these tyrants and dictators.”
By 2003 he had become Yassin’s trusted aide, and was photographed in Yassin’s home in Gaza holding a phone to the ear of the nearly paralyzed Hamas founder so he could take part in negotiations. Yassin was assassinated by Israel in 2004.
Haniyeh was one of the earliest supporters of Hamas’s entry into politics. In 1994, he said that forming a political party would “help Hamas deal with emerging developments”.
It was initially rejected by the Hamas leadership, but later approved, and Haniyeh became Palestinian prime minister following the group’s victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006, a year after Israeli forces withdrew from Gaza.
The group took control of Gaza in 2007.
In 2012, when asked by Reuters reporters whether Hamas had given up the armed struggle, Haniyeh replied “absolutely not” and said resistance would continue “in all forms – popular resistance, political, diplomatic and military resistance”.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)