Wednesday, July 31, 2024, 08:52
Ismail Haniya, leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement, have been murdered in the early hours of Wednesday in the capital of Iran while on an official visit to attend the inauguration of the country’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian. But who was Haniya?
The current Hamas leader was re-elected in August 2021 after holding office since 2017. He was born in 1963 in the Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City. Years later he enrolled at the Islamic University of Gaza, a center influenced by the religious and political postulates of the Muslim Brotherhood with a predominance of anti-Israeli sentiment, where he graduated in Arabic Literature in 1987. That same year he took part in the Intifada and joined Hamas. He was also arrested during the riots and ended up in prison.
It would not be the first time. In 1988 he was imprisoned again and, the following year, shortly after being released, he returned to prison until 1992 to serve a sentence for subversion. Immediately after his release, the Israeli authorities deported him to southern Lebanon along with other leaders of the movement and some 400 activists. In 1993 he returned to Gaza and became dean of the Islamic University. At that time, Hamas gained dramatic notoriety for the actions of its military wing in Israeli towns, with frequent suicide bombings targeting markets, buildings full of civilians or buses. Far from considering them acts of terrorism, the movement described the attacks as military operations of resistance.
Dose of moderation
In 2003, Haniya was caught in an airstrike alongside Hamas founder and spiritual leader Ahmed Yassin, who had placed him in charge of its Gaza office in an attempt by Israel to eliminate the two senior Hamas officials. Yassin was considered by the Israeli military to be one of the main masterminds of the terror attacks. The two leaders, along with a dozen other leaders, managed to escape unharmed, although Yassin would die a year later in another Israeli precision strike.
However, it was not until January 2006, the year Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections, that Haniya began to gain popularity. In fact, during his rise through the hierarchy he always tried to remain in the background, making few public appearances and renouncing the most incendiary speeches, a habit that became more pronounced after seeing Israel’s determination to eliminate the top Hamas leaders. Unlike other colleagues, he stood out for a certain moderation that led him to be considered “one of the politicians most open to dialogue with Israel within the Islamist organisation.”
The victory led to his appointment as Palestinian prime minister, though not for long. He was dismissed in 2007 by President and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, though he continued to govern the Gaza Strip after taking control of it later that year.
Ismail was re-elected in August 2021 as Hamas leader, a position he had held since May 2017. The General Shura Council chose to renew his mandate and keep Saleh al-Arouri as vice president. One of his roles has been to behave like a tightrope walker: he has tried to display pragmatism, in an attempt to break the international isolation to which the movement is subjected, but without upsetting the hardline wing.
Israel, the United States and the European Union consider Hamas a terrorist group. Ismail tried to convince them of the existence of a political shift. In 2017, the organisation introduced a series of amendments to its 1988 founding charter. Although it retained its original and certainly extremist spirit to avoid a confrontation with the more extreme core, Haniya already announced a certain shift to less radical positions: the acceptance of the creation of a State of Palestine on the borders before the 1967 war, something taboo in the original text. Hamas broke with the Muslim Brotherhood and reaped the rejection of Islamic Jihad.
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