Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s top leader in exile who had once represented a more moderate wing of the Palestinian militant group, was killed in Iran’s capital on July 31.
If the allegation is true, Mr. Haniyeh would be among the highest-ranking Hamas officials killed by Israel since Oct. 7, when Hamas militants led a cross-border attack into Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostage. Israel’s ground and air campaign in Gaza in the ensuing months has killed more than 39,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children.
Mr. Haniyeh, head of Hamas’s political bureau, was once seen as a more diplomatic-minded force in the extremist group, which has political and military wings. He was broadly popular with the Palestinian public, known as a young activist for organizing across factions and as a politician for playing soccer on the streets of Gaza’s decrepit urban refugee camps.
But after briefly heading a Palestinian unity government, Mr. Haniyeh led Hamas through a short civil war with its chief rival — the Fatah party, which governs the West Bank — and he lived his later years in Qatar, where he expanded Hamas’s outreach in the Persian Gulf and beyond.
Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yehiya Sinwar, is believed to have been the mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack. Mr. Haniyeh lauded the bloodshed as a humiliating blow to Israel’s aura of invincibility. “We will continue the resistance against this enemy until we liberate our land, all our land,” he said, according to the Associated Press.
His killing in Tehran has heightened fears of a regionwide conflict. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the country has a “duty” to avenge Mr. Haniyeh’s death and directly blamed Israel.
Michael Milshtein, a Hamas expert at Tel Aviv University, said Mr. Haniyeh shaped the group’s foreign policy and diplomacy but was less involved in military affairs.
“He was responsible for propaganda, for diplomatic relations, but he was not very powerful,” Milshtein, a former military intelligence officer, told the AP. “From time to time, Sinwar even laughed and joked, ‘He’s the more moderate, sophisticated leader, but he doesn’t understand anything about warfare.’”
Akram Atallah, a writer for the Palestinian Al-Ayyam newspaper who was imprisoned with Mr. Haniyeh in the early 1990s in Israel, told The Washington Post that Mr. Haniyeh had the charisma and contacts to “unite the Hamas movement.”
“But he was not the decision-maker in the movement, and he was not a military man,” said Atallah, speaking by phone from London.
The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court sought arrest warrants against Mr. Haniyeh, Sinwar and the head of Hamas’s military wing, Mohammed Deif, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. Similar requests were issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
Mr. Haniyeh had lived in self-imposed exile in Qatar since 2019 and was involved in negotiations aimed at securing a cease-fire in Gaza and the release of the hostages still held there.
An Israeli airstrike in Gaza killed three of Mr. Haniyeh’s sons in April. Hamas said four of the leader’s grandchildren and his sister were killed in a strike last month, the AP reported.
Ismail Haniyeh was born in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza, where his parents found shelter after fleeing the Palestinian village of Jura, now part of the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war following the announcement of the establishment of the state of Israel. They were among the estimated 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes during the months before and after the war, a period that Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or the catastrophe.
As a child, Mr. Haniyeh attended schools run by the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, according to a biography provided by the Hamas government’s media office.
Mr. Haniyeh was active in Islamist political circles and the student union as an undergraduate at Gaza’s Islamic University, where he studied Arabic literature. He joined Hamas when it was founded in 1987 during the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising.
Detained by Israel
Like thousands of other Palestinians, Mr. Haniyeh was detained by Israel for his political activism and Hamas membership. He was held for short stints in 1987 and 1988 and then for three years starting in 1989.
It was during this period, in 1990, that Atallah was held with Haniyeh in a prison in Israel’s southern Negev desert. “He seemed to be a different model from the Hamas movement that we know,” Atallah said. “He was not a fanatic, and his appearance was not fanatical.”
Because of his reputation of being “open to factions,” the Hamas movement assigned Mr. Haniyeh the role of managing relations with detainees in their section, according to Atallah. He recalled one time when Mr. Haniyeh “collected socks and made a football out of them and invited all the factions in prison to play football.”
Israel released Mr. Haniyeh from custody in 1992 but deported him to Lebanon along with a group of top Hamas officials. There he became close with Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and grew the short-cropped beard favored by the group’s militants.
Mr. Haniyeh was able to return to Gaza after the 1993 interim peace accords between Israel and the Fatah-led Palestine Liberation Organization, which set out a plan for a two-state solution. Hamas, which has called for Israel’s destruction, opposed the Oslo accords, named for the city where the negotiations were held.
Mr. Haniyeh served as Yassin’s aide and confidant in the following years as peace talks fell apart and a second Palestinian uprising began. It was in those years that Israeli journalist Avi Issacharoff said he first met Mr. Haniyeh in Gaza.
It was “back in the time when Hamas politicians were talking to Israeli media,” Issacharoff told The Post. “He wasn’t trying to be a tough guy or intimidating. He wasn’t like their military-wing type of style with the gun or anything like that. He was a real politician.”
In 1996, when Palestinians held their first legislative elections, Mr. Haniyeh was among a few Hamas members who opposed the group’s decision to boycott the vote. “To him, Oslo and the Palestinian Authority was a reality and Hamas should be engaged,” said Gazan political analyst Mkhaimar Abusada, who spoke by phone from Egypt, where he fled to earlier in the Gaza war.
Under pressure, Mr. Haniyeh backed down and toed the party line.
A decade later, Hamas reversed course and participated in Washington-backed parliamentary elections in the Palestinian territories. In an upset, Hamas won the most seats amid widespread frustration over corruption and stagnation in the Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmoud Abbas.
Mr. Haniyeh assumed the position of prime minister, avoiding the fiery rhetoric of other Hamas leaders stoking growing political divides in Gaza.
Tensions between Hamas and Fatah, however, boiled over in June 2007, when Hamas forces violently ousted the Palestinian Authority and assumed control of Gaza.
“You may find many Palestinians who would blame him for the Hamas takeover,” said Abusada, though it is “not easy to figure out whether he was involved in the decision-making process.”
In 2017, Mr. Haniyeh became Hamas’s top political leader, replacing Khaled Meshal. The following year, the State Department placed Mr. Haniyeh on its specially designated global terrorists list.
One of Mr. Haniyeh’s roles was to oversee Hamas’s financial operations, drawing from such sources as taxes on Palestinians in Gaza, fees on black-market smuggling that proliferated amid an Israeli blockade, and financial support from Iran.
Issacharoff said the movement that he “knew in 2007, the last time that I met Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza, is a completely different Hamas than we see today under the leadership of Yehiya Sinwar. It’s a way more radical group.”
Mr. Haniyeh had “an influential personality,” but “this is the way of resistance,” Hassan Khreisha, deputy speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, who served with Haniyeh in the unity government, said by phone from the Palestinian city of Tulkarm. “One person goes and another one fills the void.”
Maham Javaid and Brian Murphy contributed to this report.
