Photo: Vahid Salemi Associated Press Ismaïl Haniyeh, March 26, 2024
Agence France-Presse in Gaza
Published at 12:51 a.m.
- Middle East
Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, killed Wednesday in Iran, became known to the world in 2006 when he became prime minister of the Palestinian Authority after his movement's surprise victory in the legislative elections.
He had long advocated reconciling armed struggle and political combat within the group and maintained good relations with the leaders of the various Palestinian movements.
The sixty-year-old had until now been living in voluntary exile between Qatar and Turkey.
Born into a family of refugees from Ashkelon (Asqalan in Arabic), a few kilometers north of Gaza, he began his militant activities within the student branch of the Muslim Brotherhood at the Islamic University of Gaza, from which Hamas emerged. , before becoming a member of the student union of the Islamic University in 1983 and 1984.
Three years later, he joined Hamas at its creation, then the first Intifada broke out, an uprising which lasted until 1993. During this period, Ismaïl Haniyeh was imprisoned several times by Israel and expelled for six months to southern Lebanon.
He made himself known to the world in 2006 by becoming prime minister of the Palestinian Authority after his movement's surprise victory in the legislative elections.
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Photo: Mohammed Abed archives Agence France-Presse Ismaïl Haniyeh, then Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, in 2006, in Gaza.
After taking the head of a unity government, he committed to working towards the creation of a Palestinian state “in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with Jerusalem as its capital”, going against the official discourse of Hamas, which at the time did not recognize these borders.
But it was under his leadership that the quasi-civil war broke out in 2007 between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Deprived of its victory in the legislative elections, the Islamist movement took power in the Gaza Strip at the cost of deadly clashes which still leave resentment alive today between the two rivals.
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Jubilant tone
But cohabitation with Fatah, the party of President Mahmoud Abbas, was short-lived. Hamas ousted him by force from the Gaza Strip in 2007, two years after Israel's unilateral withdrawal from the territory.
Ismaïl Haniyeh was elected head of the Hamas political bureau in 2017 to succeed Khaled Mechaal, in exile in Qatar.
In footage released by Hamas media shortly after the bloody attack on Israel began, Mr. Haniyeh can be seen jubilantly chatting with other Hamas leaders in his office in Doha, watching an Arab television report showing Hamas commandos seizing Israeli army jeeps.
While more than nine months of war have left swathes of Gaza in ruins, Mr. Haniyeh has repeatedly insisted that the group will only release the hostages if the fighting stops for good.