The murder of Ismail Haniyeh, political leader of Hamas This Wednesday, at a safe place where he was staying during his visit to the Iranian capital, Tehran, represents a major blow for the Palestinian Islamist movement, which has been waging intense fighting with Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip since its fighters last attacked Israel on October 7.
Haniyeh is by no means the first senior Hamas figure to be targeted by Israeli intelligence in recent years. The movement’s founder and spiritual leader, Ahmed Yasín; co-founder Abdel Aziz al Rantisi; and military commander Salah Shehadeh were killed in precision bombings inside Gaza in the 2000s. Ahmed Jabari, who led Hamas’s takeover of Gaza in 2007 – after its political wing won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections – was killed in a drone strike in Gaza City in 2012.
Although Hamas has always been able to regroup and survive, this war has left it in something of a leadership vacuum. The truth is that Israel has been able to keep its promise that Hamas leaders, including those outside the Gaza Strip, would be “marked” for death. Saleh al Arouri, considered Haniyeh's right-hand mandied in an attack in Lebanon last January, and Marwan Issa, deputy military leader of Hamas, reportedly died in the Nuseirat camp (central Gaza) in March.
Just one day after Ismail Haniyeh's death, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed that Hamas's military wing leader Mohamed Deif has died during an Israeli bombing raid in mid-July in Khan Younis (Southern Strip). Deif had been at the top of Israel's most wanted list since 1995 and had survived at least seven previous attacks.
In May, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced that he had asked judges to issue arrest warrants for Deif and Haniyeh for war crimes and crimes against humanity – also against Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar. Hamas has not spoken since Thursday, but Sinwar, isolated from the world in his bunker in the Gaza Strip, must be feeling very alone.
From his base in Qatar, Haniyeh had little control or influence over events in the Palestinian enclave, where Sinwar is a prominent figure: it is unclear to what extent the late 62-year-old leader was informed of the October 7 cross-border attacks, which Israel attributes to Deif and the Al Qasam Brigades. But unlike Sinwar, Haniyeh could travel and was Hamas’s most recognizable figure, managing the group’s relations with Iran and allied movements in the Middle East, such as the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah.
He was seen as a relative moderate and led the Hamas delegation in negotiations with Israel – mediated by Egypt, Qatar and the United States – to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza and an agreement to exchange Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners, which has now taken place. seems further away than ever.
Haniyeh's possible replacement
In the past, when Hamas has been forced to elect a new leader, it has resorted to secret ballots in Gaza, the West Bank, Israeli prisons and the diaspora. However, this seems impossible in the current circumstances, with a war in Gaza and increasingly widespread violence in the occupied West Bank. In his place, Khaled Meshal, Hamas' representative abroad and Haniyeh's predecessor as head of the political bureau, is expected to take over the role of acting head of the political bureau.
The 68-year-old, a central figure in Hamas since the 1990s, was born in the West Bank but raised in Kuwait and has spent most of his life outside the Palestinian territories, working for the group from abroad. In 1997, an attempt by Israeli foreign intelligence to poison Meshal in Jordan so angered then-King Hussein that the monarch threatened to kill Israeli agents and break the peace treaty with Israel if he did not receive an antidote. Mossad was forced to hand over the antidote and admit that it had tried to poison him, in one of the service's most high-profile fiascos since its creation.
Like Haniyeh, he is seen as more pragmatic about the two-state solution and in 2017 authorized the updating of Hamas' founding statutes to include implicit acceptance of Israel's existence. That same year, he was forced to resign as political leader, after being criticized for advocating reconciliation with the West Bank-based nationalist Fatah movement after Hamas expelled it from Gaza in 2007. His relations with Iran and Syria have also deteriorated, strained since 2011, when he backed the Sunni-led revolt against President Bashar Al Assad's regime.
Meanwhile, Khalil al-Hayya, a Hamas MP and political bureau member who lives in Qatar and was also part of the negotiating team to reach a ceasefire, is from Gaza and apparently enjoys the sympathy of officials in Tehran, which would put him in a good position to succeed Haniyeh.
On the front lines, Haniyeh's death is unlikely to have much impact. Israel claims to have eliminated half of the top leadership of Hamas' military wing, including six senior brigade commanders and more than 20 battalion commanders, and to have killed or wounded 14,000 fighters.
Although its ability to launch rockets and missiles has been significantly reduced and Hamas' command and control structure has suffered, the armed group has managed to turn to guerrilla warfare and recruit civilians willing to fight into its ranks. Some well-organized units have been able to use Gaza's extensive network of underground tunnels to force Israeli troops back into supposedly cleared areas and to transform unexploded ordnance into bombs and weapons.
Israel cut off Hamas' main supply route in May, taking control of the city of Rafah (bordering Egypt), which will at some point inevitably affect the group's fighting capacity. But for now, it is far from defeated.
Text translated by Emma Reverter and updated by elDiario.es