Israel regards your complete Hamas management as terrorists and has accused Haniyeh, Meshaal and others of continuous to “pull the strings of the Hamas terror organisation”.
However how a lot Haniyeh knew concerning the Oct 7 assault beforehand will not be clear. The plan, drawn up by the Hamas army council in Gaza, was such a carefully guarded secret that some Hamas officers appeared shocked by its timing and scale.
But Haniyeh, a Sunni Muslim, had a significant hand in build up Hamas’ combating capability, partly by nurturing ties with Shi’ite Muslim Iran, which makes no secret of its help for the group.
In the course of the decade during which Haniyeh was Hamas’ prime chief in Gaza, Israel accused his management workforce of serving to to divert humanitarian help to the group’s army wing. Hamas denied it.
SHUTTLE DIPLOMACY
When he left Gaza in 2017, Haniyeh was succeeded by Yahya Sinwar, a hardliner who spent greater than twenty years in Israeli prisons and whom Haniyeh had welcomed again to Gaza in 2011 after a prisoner change.
“Haniyeh is main the political battle for Hamas with Arab governments,” Adeeb Ziadeh, a specialist in Palestinian affairs at Qatar College, mentioned earlier than his loss of life, including that he had shut ties with extra hardline figures within the group and the army wing.
“He’s the political and diplomatic entrance of Hamas,” Ziadeh mentioned.
Haniyeh and Meshaal had met officers in Egypt, which has additionally had a mediation function within the ceasefire talks. Haniyeh travelled in early November to Tehran to fulfill Iran’s supreme chief Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iranian state media reported.
Three senior officers informed Reuters that Khamenei had informed the Hamas chief in that assembly that Iran wouldn’t enter the conflict having not been informed about it prematurely. Hamas didn’t reply to requests for remark earlier than Reuters revealed its report after which issued a denial after its publication.
As a younger man, Haniyeh was a scholar activist on the Islamic College in Gaza Metropolis. He joined Hamas when it was created within the First Palestinian intifada (rebellion) in 1987. He was arrested and briefly deported.
Haniyeh grew to become a protégé of Hamas’ founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, who like Haniyeh’s household, was a refugee from the village of Al Jura close to Ashkelon.
In 1994, he informed Reuters that Yassin was a mannequin for younger Palestinians, saying: “We learnt from him the love of Islam and sacrifice for this Islam and to not kneel down to those tyrants and despots.”
By 2003, he was a trusted Yassin aide, photographed in Yassin’s Gaza residence holding a cellphone to the virtually fully paralysed Hamas founder’s ear in order that he may participate in a dialog. Yassin was assassinated by Israel in 2004.
Haniyeh was an early advocate of Hamas coming into politics. In 1994, he mentioned that forming a political get together “would allow Hamas to cope with rising developments”.
Initially overruled by the Hamas management, it was later accepted and Haniyeh grew to become Palestinian prime minister after the group received Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 a yr after Israel’s army withdrew from Gaza.
The group took management of Gaza in 2007.
In 2012, when requested by Reuters reporters if Hamas had deserted the armed wrestle, Haniyeh replied, “after all not” and mentioned resistance would proceed “in all varieties – standard resistance, political, diplomatic and army resistance”.
