In 2007, when Hamas seized control of Gaza after a week of armed clashes with the other major Palestinian faction, Fatah, the then supreme ruler of the Gaza Strip, Ismail Haniya, murdered in Tehran on Wednesdaywelcomed the press outside his modest home in Shati, the refugee camp where he was born and where the creation of Israel forcibly moved his family, originally from the Arab city where it now sits a few miles away. Ashkelon. The message was clear: unlike the Fatah leadership—with their VIP passes to military checkpoints, their security cooperation with Israel, their corruption, and their children in Western universities—Haniya was one of them: a refugee from the Nakba—the expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians in 1948—, like most Gazanswith three decades of militancy against Israel and a reputation for honesty as credentials.
It was precisely the image of purity, the connection with the street and the general feeling that Fatah had sold itself for 30 coins and that Hamas alone continued to represent the struggle against Israel that the Haniya organization had given a year earlier. victory at the ballot box. It was during the last general elections that the Palestinians held, almost twenty years ago. Haniya led the Islamist list. His speech, both in content and form, won him the victory and even attracted votes from Christian Palestinians.
Football, very popular among Palestinians and in the Arab world in general, helped to reinforce their image of solidarity. Haniya had played for the team of the Islamic University of Gaza City, where he began his political activities in the 1980s, participating in the First Intifada (1987-1993) and taking him to Israeli prisons several times over a three-year period. Even as leader of the Gaza government, he had his picture taken taking part in a party.
These were different times and a different Gaza. Haniya, assassinated at the age of 62, went on to become prime minister of the Palestinian National Authority. Not for long. President and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas dismissed him just a year later. Hamas took control of Gaza by force, leaving Palestine with two parallel governments claiming legitimacy. The international community recognized only the West Bank, which Abbas led. Gaza remained in Haniya’s hands for a decade. In both cases, without approval at the ballot boxes.
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Today, his place is taken by Israel's most wanted man, Yahia Sinwar, the mastermind behind the October 7, 2023 attacks that triggered the invasion of the Gaza Strip and whose whereabouts are unknown. Both, along with the leader of Hamas's armed wing, Mohamed Deif (who supports Israel He attempted another assassination with a rocket that same month(although he could not confirm their deaths) are the three leaders whose arrest was requested last May by the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in that attack, which killed nearly 1,200 civilians. The prosecutor He also called for the arrest of Israeli head of government Benjamin Netanyahu.and his Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, for the subsequent invasion, which has left nearly 40,000 dead.
Haniya, a devout and traditional Muslim, was considered a pragmatist. A moderate within the Islamist movement compared to hawks he outshone in the succession race, such as Mahmud al Zahar. I was prepared to accept de facto the existence of Israel, if a peace agreement before the 1967 Six-Day War would create a Palestinian state on its borders, although formal recognition was still rejected. However, he always closed ranks with the strategy of suicide bombings during the Second Intifada (“sacrificial operations for the sanctification of God,” he called them) and he gradually hardened his approach. applauded the attacks of October 7He defined it as a blow to the table that succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue in the global spotlight “at an unprecedented level” and “opening the door for the creation of a Palestinian state.”
Haniya had survived previous assassination attempts, both by Israel (he is in office) and by Palestinian enemies. Since October, he has watched from a distance as he loses family members. Three children and four grandchildren in an aerial bombardment of Gazalast May. “Whoever believes that attacking my children during the negotiation dialogue and before an agreement is reached will force Hamas to lower its demands is living in a fiction,” he replied, words that surprised by the rudeness and coldness with which he responded, at least publicly, to that blow.
Although his position theoretically placed him at the top of Hamas, his power was largely symbolic. Sinwar, a former commander of the armed wing who spent two decades behind bars in Israel, had set the tone at Hamas, in an internal struggle – political and personal – with Haniya, in which he succeeded in imposing his more radical vision. The massive attack on October 7 caught not only Israelis by surprise. Hamas’s political leadership in exile has indicated that it was unaware of its preparations, even as it celebrated them without incident.
“Dead man”
Although Sinwar's head would in fact be Israel's real big game hunter, Netanyahu had already made it clear in October that all Hamas leaders, without distinction, were “dead men” wherever they were in the world, in the style of the hunts carried out in various parts of the planet by the Mossad (the foreign intelligence services) after the attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics that Steven Spielberg brought to the big screen.
In 1992, he was one of the Hamas members who Israel deported to Lebanon. He subsequently worked hand in hand with Hamas founder and then leader Ahmed Yassin. murdered by Israel in 2004, as did his successor shortly after, Abdelaziz Rantisi. He rose through the ranks and eventually became a right-hand man. of the next political leader, Khaled Meshalopaquely defended by the organization.
He succeeded Meshal in 2017five days after Hamas reformed its founding charter to adopt de facto the two-state solution, eliminating obvious anti-Semitic elements and defining the conflict as political, against Zionism, rather than religious, against Jews. Under Donald Trump, the United States called him a “global terrorist” a year later. Washington and the EU consider Hamas a terrorist organization.
Leaders of Hamas's political bureau they live abroad. Haniya did this between Turkey (he is a friend of its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan) and Qatar, the emirate from which Israel (through its great ally, the United States) had demanded that he expel him. He therefore intended to pressure Hamas to lower its demands (mainly the definitive end of the war) in the negotiations to extradite the rest of the Israeli hostages in Gaza. Haniya was not only responsible for the movement's external relations, but was also personally one of the negotiators of the pact, which led Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al Thani to ask this Wednesday on the social network Twitter: how can mediation bear fruit if one of the parties kills the other's negotiator?
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