On the southern outskirts of Beirut, Saleh al-Arouri, number two of Hamas, mastermind and strategist of the armed struggle, changed his hideout several times a day. He was killed in the Lebanese capital, together with five other senior members of the militia, in an attack attributed to Israel. The strict security measures did not protect him enough. And in Beirut there are already those who claim that some spy, infiltrated by Hezbollah's super-efficient security service, managed to inform the Israeli Mossad of Arouri's latest position. According to Lebanese intelligence sources, the senior Hamas exponent had gone to that building in Musharrafiye, the neighborhood where the raid took place, for a secret meeting with the other Hamas leaders in Lebanon. After the October 7 attacks, the Israeli authorities had assured that they wanted to hunt down Hamas leaders wherever they were. From Beirut, Arouri himself had prophetically announced last March the attacks against Israel starting from the Strip: «Gaza – Arouri had said – will join the global struggle which will not be limited to Palestine».
The 58-year-old Arouri, originally from the West Bank, had founded the Izz ad Din al Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas. But for years his main role was that of a link between the Palestinian movement in Gaza and its regional allies, Hezbollah and Iran above all. In Beirut, where he had resided since 2018, he was the point man of Hasan Nasrallah, the immovable leader of the Lebanese Shiite movement. The two met very frequently, especially since the outbreak of war in early October. For almost ten years, in 2015, the United States had placed a reward of five million on his head, placing him on the list of “terrorists on a global scale”. And by many in Israel he was considered more dangerous than Yahya Sinwar, leader of Hamas in the Strip with whom Arouri shared the long militancy of the movement's cells inside Israeli prisons. Arouri spent 22 years in the enemy's prisons, from the end of the 1980s to 2007, with a brief interruption at the end of the 1990s.
Once released, the Israelis expelled him and deported him to Syria, to the court of President Bashar al Assad, an ally of Iran and Hezbollah. In 2011 he participated in the negotiations with Israel for the exchange of prisoners in which he, among the over a thousand Palestinians, was freed, Sinwar himself. But the Syrian civil war in 2012 forced the entire Hamas leadership to leave Damascus. Arouri had found another regional location and ended up in Turkey, the mother house of the global Muslim Brotherhood. From here Arouri had distinguished himself as the man of mediation between Hamas and Fatah, the party of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazen), between Hamas and Egypt. Then, in 2018, after the reconciliation between Turkey and Israel, Arouri finally repaired to Beirut. Where since October 7th he also coordinated the military activities of Hamas from the southern Lebanese front against the Israeli army in the Upper Galilee.
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