Ismail Haniya, Hamas’ political leader since 2017, is the latest in a series of top officials of the so-called Islamic Resistance Movement to be killed by Israel since its birth in the late 1980s. So far, the group, which blames Israel for the killing, has not announced who will fill the vacant position. The Jewish state has not acknowledged responsibility, as it does not do on many other occasions when it carries out such operations abroad. Before being the head of the entire organization, Haniya was the leader of Hamas in Gaza since 2006, when the organization won the 2006 elections in Gaza against the Fatah party, the main arm of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA).
The security forces of the Jewish state pursue the top leaders of the Palestinian armed resistance, sometimes for years, regardless of the fact that, as in the case of Haniya, they are part of the apparatus that has been trying for months to scratch out a ceasefire in a war that is now approaching ten months old and that, with almost 40,000 dead, is the bloodiest that has ever been fought in the Gaza Strip.
The last Hamas leader to be killed was the organisation’s number two, Saleh al-Aruri, who was born in the West Bank in 1966. He was shot down by an Israeli drone in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, on 2 January. The current conflict was already in its fourth month and Israel was trying to send the message that there would be no mercy for the leadership of the group that had led the bloodiest attack since the birth of the Jewish state in 1948. That massacre on 7 October was precisely the trigger for the war. But Hamas has long experience in replacing leaders killed by the enemy.
Twenty years ago, in the midst of the Second Intifada and in a period of less than a month, the founder and spiritual leader of the movement, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, aged 67, and his successor were assassinated. Disabled since birth, Yassin was killed by three shells fired from an Apache helicopter early in the morning on 23 March as he was about to perform the first prayer of the day. The leader had already been wounded in a similar operation the previous year.
At that time, the number two, Abdelaziz Rantisi, took over the Islamist organisation. He rose to the top by promising to avenge the murder of the sheikh and having already been the target of Israeli troops, who narrowly missed a bombing a few months earlier and left him wounded. The Israeli troops did achieve their objective on 18 April, less than a month after Rantisi, a paediatrician, took the reins of Hamas. Similarly, shells fired from a combat helicopter ended his life at the age of 57. He was travelling in a vehicle with one of his six children and a bodyguard, who also died.
On July 22, 2002, a powerful bomb dropped from an F-16 fighter jet on a building in overcrowded Gaza killed Hamas military chief Salah Shehade, born in 1953 and another influential member of the group since its founding. The missile also killed his wife, nine children and half a dozen others. This is a standard practice for Israel, which often ignores international humanitarian law and the prohibition on carrying out such actions even when it has located an enemy leader.
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Also during the turbulent period of the Intifada, on 21 August 2003, Israel killed another of the top leaders, Ismail Abu Shanab, in an airstrike. “The murder of Abu Shanab also means the murder of the ceasefire and Hamas holds the Zionist enemy fully responsible for the consequences of this crime,” Haniya, who had not yet risen to the top of the fundamentalist organisation’s political ladder, reacted at the time.
In November 2012, Ahmed Yabari, born in 1960 and then the all-powerful head of Hamas’ military wing, was killed in another of the so-called targeted assassinations by the Israeli Security Forces. Yabari achieved his highest recognition within Gaza and as an enemy of the Jewish State when he became the jailer and negotiator for the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. The young man remained kidnapped for five years and finally returned to his country in 2011 after being exchanged for more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners in the most spectacular operation of its kind known.
One of the key aspects of this murder will be its impact on the truce negotiations that Hamas and Israel have been holding for months to free the 115 hostages who have been held since October 7 in the Gaza Strip, although around 40 have already been reported dead. That day, in addition to killing some 1,200 people in Israeli territory, the attackers, led by Hamas, took another 250 people hostage. Just over a hundred were released in the only week of truce that there has been during the war, the last one in November.
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