Palestinian politician and member of the Political Bureau of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas). He helped establish the movement’s military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, in the West Bank.
Israel attributed to him responsibility for operations carried out by the resistance in the West Bank in which Israeli soldiers and policemen were killed. He was arrested in 1993 and sentenced to life in prison, of which he served 18 years before being released as part of the prisoner exchange deal concluded between Hamas and Israel in 2011 in exchange for the release of soldier Gilad Shalit.
After his release from prison, he was deported outside Palestine and settled in Türkiye, where he was assigned to the Hamas prisoners’ file and financial affairs.
In 2019, the United States imposed sanctions on him and other leaders of the movement, prohibiting the disposal of any property in his name and generally preventing any American citizen from dealing with him or “with the entities he represents.”
Saleh al-Arouri was elected deputy head of Hamas in the West Bank in 2021, and after al-Arouri was assassinated on January 2, 2024 in Beirut, Zaher Jabarin became acting head of the movement in the West Bank.
He is also a member of the negotiating delegation for the truce and ceasefire in the Gaza Strip between the Palestinian resistance factions and Israel in the war launched by the occupation on Gaza on October 7, 2023.
Birth and upbringing
Zaher Ali Musa Jabarin was born on September 18, 1968 in the city of Salfit in the northwestern part of the West Bank.
He was raised in a family of 9, with 2 brothers and 4 sisters.
He began praying regularly at a young age, when he was in the third year of middle school, and he used to go to the mosques in his town, Salfit, which was called “Little Moscow” because it was considered the center of communism at that time.
It was strange and unusual for a young boy to go to the mosque at that time, according to what he narrated in his book “The Story of Blood from the Arteries of Al-Qassam,” as most of the mosque-goers were elderly.
His young age did not prevent him from participating in religious activities and celebrations in the mosque, despite the disapproval these initiatives received from those who were not accustomed to these events in the town’s mosques.
His mother died while he was in prison serving a life sentence, and the Israeli authorities refused to allow him to attend her funeral. His father died a year after his release, and he was unable to see him face to face because he was deported from Palestine.
Study and training
He received his primary, intermediate and secondary education in Salfit schools, then moved to Nablus to complete his university studies in Islamic Sharia at An-Najah National University, but did not obtain a bachelor’s degree due to his arrest.
During his imprisonment, he learned Hebrew and obtained a BA in Political Science from the Hebrew University.
Political and activism
At university, he joined the Islamic Bloc and was one of its pioneers, leading student demonstrations during the first intifada in 1987, and was responsible for distributing leaflets in the West Bank.
One of his first acts of resistance was writing anti-occupation slogans on walls. He was one of five young men who founded the Hamas branch in Salfit.
He was also responsible for a unit called “Throwing Arms”, whose mission was to organize demonstrations, throw stones and Molotov cocktails at occupation soldiers, and write graffiti.
After his release from detention in 1991, he formed the first Qassam cells in the West Bank with Adnan Mar’i, Ali Assi, and Yahya Ayyash. Their role was to uncover, kidnap, and interrogate collaborators.
He also worked with his comrades to collect donations to purchase weapons, recruit resistance fighters, and prepare armed groups to carry out operations against the Israeli occupation.
During this period, he met Sheikh Saleh al-Arouri and they agreed to develop resistance work. The first martyrdom operation he helped prepare was the operation carried out by the young man Muhammad Basharat from Tamoun, near Tubas.
The young man wore a military uniform similar to that of the occupation soldiers and carried a short M16 weapon. He carried out his operation in December 1992 on French Hill, in which one soldier was killed and others were injured.
A number of Hamas leaders in the West Bank were arrested after this operation, and Zaher Jabarin became wanted by the Israeli occupation.
During his pursuit, Zaher went to Birzeit and met Yahya Ayyash at its university. He offered him to join the military action and they agreed to develop resistance methods by manufacturing explosive materials.
Ayyash identified the materials needed to make the explosives, and after he made them, the four: Zaher Jabarin, Yahya Ayyash, Ali Asi, and Adnan Mar’i, went to a place between the towns of Qaraweh Bani Zeid and Farkha, affiliated with Ramallah, to test the explosive device, but the experiment failed.
A week after this attempt, the fault in the first explosive device was discovered and repaired, and the second experiment was conducted in the presence of the same people and was successful. This was the beginning of the bombing and martyrdom operations that bore the signature of Engineer Yahya Ayyash.
Years of detention
The Israeli army stormed the town of Salfit on January 5, 1988, and violent clashes took place, during which Zaher was shot in his left leg.
After the army withdrew in the evening, his father and uncle took him in a car to the hospital in Nablus. On the way, near the neighboring village of Iskaka, they were stopped by an ambush set up by occupation soldiers, who arrested him while he was wounded. He spent a month under investigation and torture, before being sentenced to 8 months in prison, during which he was transferred between most of the Israeli detention centers, including Far’a, Megiddo, Atlit, and the Negev.
He was arrested again in early 1991, and was investigated in Tulkarm and the slaughterhouse, and sentenced to 10 months, then released.
On April 1, 1993, Israel arrested him and sentenced him to 3 life sentences and 35 years in prison. He was accused of being responsible for the special Qassam unit that planned and kidnapped the Israeli soldier “Nissim Toledano” and liquidated him in 1992, and for supplying a cell with weapons that carried out operations that led to the killing of two Israeli policemen.
Upon his arrest, the Israeli press described him as being behind the establishment of the most dangerous group formed by Hamas in its history. In 1998, Zaher was returned for investigation for three months after his connection to the Qassam “Martyrs for Prisoners” cells was discovered, which were planning to kidnap Israeli soldiers and officers in order to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners.
After completing the investigation with him, he was placed in solitary confinement, where he spent two years. He was not released from it until 2000, after the famous strike organized by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, in which they demanded the release of detainees from solitary confinement cells.
The prisoners of Ashkelon Prison chose him to be a representative of the Hamas prisoners in the Palestinian factions’ prisoners’ dialogue committee with the prison administration.
After spending 18 years in prison, he was released in the “Wafa al-Ahrar” prisoner exchange deal in 2011 and deported outside Palestine.
Political activity after freedom
After his release, he moved to Syria and from there to Turkey, where he settled and became a financial official for Hamas and managed projects that generated funds for the movement.
In September 2019, the United States imposed sanctions on Zaher Jabarin as head of Hamas’s financial bureau, along with other leaders of the movement.
Sanctions mean prohibiting the disposal of any property of the persons or entities subject to sanctions and generally prohibiting any US citizen from dealing with those persons or entities.
Jabareen was elected deputy to Saleh al-Arouri, head of the Hamas movement in the West Bank, for the period between 2021 and 2025, and after al-Arouri’s assassination, he served as acting head of the movement in the West Bank.
He participated in the negotiations hosted by the Qatari capital, Doha, regarding the truce and ceasefire in Gaza as part of the Hamas delegation.
The American Wall Street Journal published an article about him, describing him as representing a financial empire worth millions of dollars that finances Hamas’s military operations, including Operation Flood of Al-Aqsa, which the resistance launched against the Gaza Strip settlements on October 7, 2023.
She stated that Zaher Jabarin is the engineer of Hamas’s financial relations with Iran, and that he is responsible for transferring money to the Gaza Strip for years, bypassing Western international sanctions through channels in several countries in the Middle East.
He is also responsible for managing a portfolio of companies that provide steady funding to Hamas, as well as a network of private sector donors and businessmen who invest on its behalf, she added.
Books
In Ashkelon Central Prison, he wrote a book entitled “The Story of Blood from the Arteries of the Qassam Brigades” in 1998, in which he documented the history of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades in the West Bank, the experience of the first men of the Qassam Brigades and the operations that were carried out, and in which he spoke about the mistakes that were made and the obstacles that faced the military work at its beginning.
He tried to get this book out of prison through small letters, but the Israeli authorities discovered this and destroyed them. They put him in solitary confinement for several years, then he tried again and succeeded. The book was published a year after his release.