Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated: All you need to know about the former Palestine PM

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran on Wednesday, according to reports in Iranian state media, with Hamas and the state both blaming Israel for the killing.

Widely considered Hamas' overall leader, Haniyeh was a prominent member of the movement in the late 1980s, with Israel imprisoning him for three years in 1989 as it cracked down on the first Palestinian uprising.

At the time of his death, Haniyeh had been living in Qatar for the past few years, after he was designated a terrorist by the US Department of State in 2018.


Read More: Hamas Leader Ismail Haniyeh Assassinated

Haniyeh has spent a lot of time away from Palestine, with the Hamas chief exiled in 1992 to a no-man's-land between Israel and Lebanon, along with a number of other leaders. After a year in exile, he returned to Gaza in 1993.

In 1997, he was appointed head of the office of Hamas's spiritual leader, strengthening his position. Haniyeh was appointed Palestinian prime minister in 2006 by President Mahmoud Abbas after Hamas won the most seats in national elections, but was dismissed a year later after the group ousted Mr Abbas' Fatah party from the Gaza Strip in a week of deadly violence.

Haniyeh rejected his sacking as "unconstitutional", stressing that his government "would not abandon its national responsibilities towards the Palestinian people", and continued to rule in Gaza. He was elected head of Hamas's political bureau in 2017.

Read More: Wayanad Landslide Death Toll

In recent years, he led Hamas from Qatar and Turkey in recent years, taking part in negotiations between Israel and Hamas, mediated by Egypt, Qatar and the United States, to end the war in Gaza in exchange for hostages captured in the Hamas-led attack on Israel.

Ismail Haniyeh: The early years

Haniyeh was born in 1962 in the Shati refugee camp north of Gaza City, to Palestinian parents who in 1948 had been displaced from their home in what is now Israel, in Ashkelon. He studied at schools run by the main United Nations agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, and went on to study Arabic literature at the Islamic University of Gaza.

He was arrested by the Israeli military and served several sentences in Israeli jails in the 1980s and 1990s.

His rise to power in Gaza was aided by his mentor, the spiritual leader and a founder of Hamas, Sheik Yassin, for whom he served as personal secretary. The two were targets of an attempted Israeli assassination attempt in 2003; the next year, Yassin was killed by the Israeli military.

Wanted by Israel in the war

In May, the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court said he would seek an arrest warrant for Haniyeh. The prosecutor accused him and other Hamas leaders of war crimes and crimes against humanity in relation to the October attack on Israel, including “extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape and sexual assault in detention.”

In June, Hamas said that Haniyeh’s sister and her family were killed in a strike by the Israeli military on the Haniyeh family home in Gaza, an assertion the military did not confirm. In April, three of Haniyeh’s 13 sons were killed by Israeli forces in another military operation in Gaza.

He was defiant in the face of the loss, a common theme in Haniyeh’s life. “We shall not give in, no matter the sacrifices,” Haniyeh said at the time, noting that he’d already lost dozens of family members in the war.

With inputs from Reuters, New York Times