Haniyeh was seen as the most moderate face of Hamas

DUBAI/LONDON:

Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader killed in Iran, was the hardline face of the Palestinian group’s international diplomacy as the war raged in Gaza, where three of his sons were killed in an Israeli airstrike.

But despite the rhetoric, many diplomats saw him as a moderate compared to the more hard-line members of the Iranian-backed group in Gaza.

Appointed to the top Hamas post in 2017, Haniya has shuttled between Turkey and the Qatari capital Doha, escaping the blockaded Gaza Strip’s travel limits and enabling him to act as a negotiator in ceasefire talks or hold talks with the Hamas ally, Iran.

“All the normalization agreements that you (the Arab states) signed with (Israel) will not end this conflict,” Haniyeh told Qatar-based Al Jazeera television shortly after the October 7 raid by Hamas militants.

Israel’s response to the strike has been a military campaign that has killed more than 35,000 people inside Gaza so far, according to health authorities in the region.

Sons killed in an airstrike

Three of Haniyeh’s sons – Hazem, Amir and Mohammad – were killed on April 10 when an Israeli airstrike hit the car they were driving, Hamas said. Haniya also lost four of his grandchildren, three girls and a boy, in the attack, Hamas said.

Haniyeh had denied Israeli claims that his sons were fighters for the group and said “the interests of the Palestinian people come first” when asked if their killing would affect the truce talks.

Despite the harsh language in public, Arab diplomats and officials had seen him as relatively pragmatic compared to more hard-line voices inside Gaza, where Hamas’ military wing planned the Oct. 7 attack.

An Israeli airstrike in the densely populated southern suburbs of Beirut has heightened fears of an escalation of a wider conflict in the Middle East.

While telling the Israeli military they would be “drowning in the sands of Gaza,” he and his predecessor as Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, had moved into the region for talks on a Qatar-brokered truce deal with Israel, the which would include a hostage exchange for Palestinians in Israeli prisons as well as more aid to Gaza.

Israel considers the entire Hamas leadership to be terrorists and has accused Haniyeh, Meshaal and others of continuing to “pull the strings of the Hamas terrorist organization.”

But how much Haniyeh knew in advance about the Oct. 7 attack is unclear. The plan, drawn up by Hamas’ military council in Gaza, was such a closely guarded secret that some Hamas officials appeared shocked by its timing and scope.

However, Haniyeh, a Sunni Muslim, has had a major hand in developing Hamas’s fighting capacity, in part by cultivating ties with Shiite Muslim Iran, which has made no secret of its support for the group.

During the decade that Haniyeh was Hamas’ top leader in Gaza, Israel accused his leadership group of helping to divert humanitarian aid to the organization’s military wing. Hamas denied this.

Shuttle diplomacy

When he left Gaza in 2017, Haniyeh succeeded him Yahya Shinwara hardliner who spent more than two decades in Israeli prisons and whom Haniya had welcomed back to Gaza in 2011 after a prisoner exchange.

“Hanieh leads the political battle for Hamas with Arab governments,” Antib Ziadeh, an expert on Palestinian affairs at Qatar University, said before his death, adding that he had close ties to more hard-line figures in the group and the military wing. .

“It is the political and diplomatic front of Hamas,” Ziadeh said.

Haniyeh and Meshaal had met with officials in Egypt, which also had a mediating role in the ceasefire talks. Haniyeh traveled in early November to Tehran to meet Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali KhameneiIran’s state media reported.

Three senior officials told Reuters that Khamenei had told the Hamas leader at that meeting that Iran would not enter the war, since he had not been informed about it in advance. Hamas did not respond to requests for comment before Reuters published its report and then denied it after it was published.

As a young man, Haniyeh was a student activist at the Islamic University in Gaza City. Joined Hamas when it was formed in the First Palestinian Intifada (uprising) in 1987. He was arrested and briefly deported.

Haniyeh became a protégé of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, who, like Haniyeh’s family, was a refugee from the village of Al Jura near Ashkelon. In 1994, he told Reuters that Yassin was a role model for young Palestinians, saying: “We learned from him the love of Islam and sacrifice for that Islam and not to kneel to these tyrants and despots.”

By 2003 he was a trusted aide to Yassin, photographed at Yassin’s home in Gaza holding a phone to the nearly paralyzed Hamas founder’s ear so he could take part in a conversation. Yassin was assassinated by Israel in 2004.

Haniyeh was one of the first supporters of Hamas entering politics. In 1994, he said that forming a political party “would allow Hamas to deal with emerging developments.”

Initially rejected by the Hamas leadership, it was later approved and Haniyeh became Palestinian prime minister after the group won Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006, a year after the Israeli army withdrew from Gaza.

The group took control of Gaza in 2007.

In 2012, when asked by Reuters reporters if Hamas had given up the armed struggle, Haniyeh replied “of course not” and said resistance would continue “in all forms – popular resistance, political, diplomatic and military resistance”.