In 2007, when Hamas took control of Gaza after a week of armed clashes with the other major Palestinian faction, Fatah, the then ruler of the Strip, Ismail Haniya, assassinated this Wednesday in Tehran, received the press in front of his humble house in Shati, the refugee camp where he was born and to which the creation of Israel forcibly brought his family, originally from the Arab town where today stands a few kilometers from the Israeli city, Ashkelon. The message was clear: unlike the Fatah bigwigs – with their VIP passes for military checkpoints, their security cooperation with Israel, their corruption and their children in Western universities – Haniya was one more: a refugee from the Nakba – the expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians in 1948 – like most Gazans, with three decades of militancy against Israel and a reputation for honesty as credentials.
It was precisely the image of cleanliness, the connection with the street and the general feeling that Fatah had been sold for 30 bucks and that only Hamas still represented the fight against Israel that had given Haniya’s organisation victory at the polls a year earlier. It was in the last general elections held by the Palestinians, almost two decades ago. Haniya was leading the Islamist list. His discourse, in substance and form, won him victory, even attracting votes from Christian Palestinians.
Football, which is very popular among Palestinians and in the Arab world in general, helped to cement his image of being a local. Haniya had played for the team of the Islamic University of Gaza City, where he began his political activity in the 1980s, which involved him in the First Intifada (1987-1993) and led him to several Israeli prisons, for three years on one occasion. Even as head of the government in Gaza, he had himself photographed participating in a football match.
Those were different times and different Gaza. Haniya, who was assassinated at the age of 62, then became prime minister of the Palestinian National Authority. For a short time. The president and leader of Fatah, Mahmoud Abbas, dismissed him just a year later. Hamas took control of Gaza by force and Palestine was left with two parallel governments claiming legitimacy. The international community only recognised the one in the West Bank, led by Abbas. The one in Gaza remained in the hands of Haniya for a decade. In both cases, without the endorsement of the ballot box.
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Today, his place is occupied by Israel’s most wanted man, Yahia Sinwar, the mastermind behind the October 7, 2023 attacks that triggered the invasion of the Strip and whose whereabouts are now unknown. Both, along with the leader of Hamas’s armed wing, Mohamed Deif (whom Israel tried to assassinate this month with a missile, although it cannot confirm his death), are the three leaders whose arrest was requested last May by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in that attack, with nearly 1,200 dead, mostly civilians. The prosecutor also requested the arrest of the Israeli head of government, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for the subsequent invasion, which has already claimed nearly 40,000 lives.
A devout and traditional Muslim, Haniya was seen as a pragmatist, a moderate within the Islamist movement compared to hawks he had outdone in the race for succession, such as Mahmoud al-Zahar. He was willing to accept de facto Israel’s existence, if a peace agreement created a Palestinian state on the borders prior to the 1967 Six-Day War, although it maintained its rejection of formal recognition. However, it always closed ranks with the strategy of suicide attacks during the Second Intifada (“sacrificial operations for the sanctification of God,” it called them) and hardened its position. It applauded the attacks of October 7. It defined it as a blow on the table that managed to place the Palestinian issue in the world spotlight “at an unprecedented level” and opened “the door to the creation of a Palestinian state.”
Haniya had survived previous assassination attempts, both by Israel (which is a given in office) and by Palestinian enemies. Since October, she has watched from a distance as she has lost family members: three children and four grandchildren in an airstrike in Gaza last May. “Anyone who believes that attacking my children during the negotiation dialogue and before an agreement is reached will force Hamas to lower its demands is living in a fiction,” she responded, words that surprised by the crudeness and coldness with which she reacted, at least in public, to that blow.
Although his position theoretically placed him at the top of Hamas, his power was largely symbolic. Sinwar, a former commander of the armed wing who spent two decades behind bars in Israel, had been setting the tone for Hamas, in an internal struggle – political and personal – with Haniya in which he managed to impose his more radical vision. The massive attack on October 7 did not only surprise Israelis. Hamas’s own political leadership in exile has indicated that it was not aware of its preparation, although it welcomed it wholeheartedly.
“Dead man”
Although Sinwar’s head would in fact be the real big game for Israel, Netanyahu had already made it clear in October that all Hamas leaders, without distinction, were “dead men”, wherever they were in the world, in the style of the hunt around the world carried out by the Mossad (the secret services abroad) after the attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics that Steven Spielberg brought to the big screen.
In 1992, he was one of the Hamas members deported to Lebanon by Israel. He was then working closely with the founder and then leader of Hamas, Ahmed Yassin, who was assassinated by Israel in 2004, as was his successor, Abdelaziz Rantisi, shortly afterwards. He rose through the ranks and eventually became the right-hand man of the next political leader, Khaled Meshal, who was secretly ousted by the organisation.

He succeeded Meshal in 2017, five days after Hamas amended its Founding Charter to accept de facto the two-state solution, removing obvious anti-Semitic elements and defining the conflict as political, against Zionism, rather than religious, against Jews. Under Donald Trump, the United States designated Hamas a “global terrorist” organization a year later. Washington and the EU consider Hamas a terrorist organization.
The leaders of Hamas’s political bureau live abroad. Haniya was doing so between Turkey (he is a friend of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan) and Qatar, the emirate that Israel had been demanding (through its great ally, the United States) to expel him. He intended in this way to pressure Hamas to lower its demands (mainly, the definitive end of the war) in the negotiations to hand over the rest of the Israeli hostages in Gaza. Haniya was not only in charge of the movement’s external relations, but one of the negotiators in person of the pact, which led the Qatari Prime Minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al Thani, to ask this Wednesday on the social network X, formerly called Twitter: “How can a mediation bear fruit when one of the parties kills the negotiator of the other?”
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