Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran at the age of 62 in what the Palestinian group described as “a treacherous Zionist raid on his residence.”
Haniyeh, who briefly served as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority government in 2006, was killed Wednesday morning along with a bodyguard when the house where he was staying was targeted, nearly 10 months into Israel’s war on Gaza. Haniyeh was in Tehran to attend the inauguration of Iran’s new president, Massoud Pezeshkian, on Tuesday.
The Hamas leader has become a major force in the Palestinian liberation movement and, like his colleagues and generations of Palestinian politicians and activists, he had long been in Israel’s crosshairs. Although Israel has not officially claimed responsibility for the assassination, an Israeli minister celebrated Haniyeh’s death in a message on X.
Haniyeh was born in the Shati refugee camp on the coast of Gaza City to parents displaced from Asqalan (now known as Ashkelon) during the creation of Israel in 1948.
In his youth, Haniyeh was a student activist at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he studied Arabic literature. In 1983, while at the university, he joined the Islamic Students Bloc, an organization widely considered the precursor to Hamas.
In December 1987, during the First Intifada, a Palestinian uprising broke out against the Israeli occupation. Haniyeh was among the young people who participated in the protests. It was also the year that Hamas was founded, of which Haniyeh was one of the youngest members.
Israel imprisoned Haniyeh at least three times. After serving his longest sentence, three years, he was deported to Lebanon in 1992 along with hundreds of other Hamas members, including leaders Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi and Mahmoud Zahhar, as well as members of other Palestinian resistance groups.
Haniyeh returned to Gaza a year later, after the signing of the first Oslo Accords, and became a close confidant of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader and founder of Hamas. After Yassin’s release in 1997, Haniyeh was appointed his assistant.
This notoriety made Haniyeh a target for assassination, in an Israel that had established a long tradition of assassinating Palestinian leaders.
Together, Haniyeh and Yassin survived an Israeli assassination attempt in September 2003 by escaping from a building in Gaza City seconds before it was hit by an Israeli airstrike.
A few months later, Yassin was killed by Israeli forces as he left a mosque after dawn prayers. The following month, al-Rantisi was assassinated by a missile strike from an Israeli helicopter on Gaza City.
“After 2003, Haniyeh gained great popularity among Hamas militants simply because of his position, his position and his media appearances,” Hassan Barrari, an analyst and professor at Qatar University, told Tel Aviv Tribune. “He remained an important figure until his assassination.”
Haniyeh’s stature within the Palestinian movement grew further in 2006, when Hamas ran in the Palestinian legislative elections for the first time since its creation. The group won the most votes, dealing a major blow to Fatah and making Haniyeh prime minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA).
The result caught the United States, which had called an election, off guard.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, then a New York senator, said in leaked tapes after the election: “I don’t think we should have pushed for elections in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake. And if we were going to push for elections, we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”
Dissatisfied with Hamas’s central role in Palestinian governance, Western governments have suspended aid to the Palestinian Authority, placing the organization under severe financial pressure. The United States and many other Western governments consider Hamas a “terrorist” organization.
Under Western pressure and amid heightened tensions between Hamas and Fatah, PA President Mahmoud Abbas dismissed Haniyeh and dissolved his government. In 2007, an independent Hamas-led government was established in Gaza.
When Hamas took control of Gaza, Israel, in cooperation with neighboring Egypt, imposed a siege on the enclave that has lasted for 17 years. “This siege must not break our will and must not turn this conflict into an internal Palestinian conflict. This conflict must be directed against the parties that imposed the siege on the Palestinian people,” Haniyeh said at a press conference in 2006.
Appointed head of Hamas’s political bureau in 2017 to replace Khaled Meshal, Haniyeh has led Hamas’s diplomacy from several locations, including Turkey and the Qatari capital, Doha. He has served as a negotiator in ceasefire negotiations or participated in talks with Iran, a key supporter of Palestinian liberation.
“Haniyeh was a pragmatic politician,” Palestinian political analyst Nour Odeh told Tel Aviv Tribune. “He was known for maintaining very positive relations with Palestinian leaders from all factions.”
After the October 7 attacks on southern Israel, the Israeli government made it clear that Hamas’s top leaders were on its blacklist. Many of Haniyeh’s associates have since been killed in Gaza.
In April, three of his sons were killed in an Israeli airstrike that hit their vehicle. Four of his grandchildren were also killed – three girls and a boy. In total, Haniyeh said, 60 members of his family have been killed in the past 10 months.
“All our people and all the families of the people of Gaza have paid a heavy price with the blood of their children, and I am one of them,” he said in an interview.
That sentiment will remain one of Haniyeh’s lasting legacies, said Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer and analyst who served as a legal adviser to the Palestinian team negotiating with Israel from 2000 to 2005. “He will be known for demanding freedom and for his strength even when his family was being hunted,” Buttu said.
Haniyeh’s assassination is the latest of a senior Hamas official. The last, Saleh al-Arouri, was killed in January by an Israeli drone strike in Beirut.
But Barrari said Israeli assassinations have “never ended Hamas” in the past and would not do so now.
“It’s not like Israel is fighting a mafia. These people represent the Palestinian resistance,” he said.
