Nearly a year into their genocide of Palestine, Israel managed to assassinate their highest-profile target, the Hamas leader and former Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniyeh, when he was on a courtesy call in Iran. The assassination marks another roadblock to the stuttering negotiations, where a progressively brutal and brutalist Tel Aviv has played a major spoiling role, and in which Haniyeh was a key negotiator as Hamas’ principal political leader.

In his early sixties, Haniyeh was assassinated by an airstrike on his residence after arriving in Iran to attend the inauguration of Mahmoud Pezeshkian, a former health minister recently elected to replace the recently killed Ebrahim Raisi in the Iranian presidency. The assassination marks part of a pattern both of Israeli assassinations of its opponents as well as of Iranian security lapses.

Given the indiscriminate brutality with which Israel has long targeted Palestinians at large, it can hardly be expected that a political-cum-military foe such as Hamas would lose leaders. Since the 1990s Israel has been targeting Hamas leaders on and off for assassination: lethally inventive engineer Yahya Ayyash, was killed in 1996, Haniyeh’s predecessor Khaled Mashaal was unsuccessfully targeted the following year, before during the 2000s Palestinian uprising top negotiator Ismail Abu-Shanab, widely respected preacher Ahmad Yasin, military commanders Salah Shihadeh and Ibrahim Muqadmeh, and founder Abdul-Aziz Rantisi were killed. In the years that followed Palestinian interior minister Saeed Siam and military commander Ahmad Jabari were among other major Hamas leaders killed by Israel. The process has only accelerated in Israel’s frenzied bloodshed of the past year, which has killed military commanders Marwan Issa, Raed Attar, and Ahmad Ghandour among many others. Haniyeh himself reacted with sober resolve to the targeted killing of his family members this spring, stating that his family was hardly exceptional to countless other Palestinian families wiped out by Tel Aviv: typically, even such a stiff upper lip by a bereaved father was greeted with wild attempts at vilification by pro-Israel media.

Haniyeh’s Career

In a way, though, Haniyeh’s assassination is unusual in that he engaged diplomatically to an extent well beyond most of Israel’s other Hamas targets since his days as an aide to the group’s influential founder Yasin. Haniyeh was a key leader in Hamas’ transition from the guerrilla attacks of the early 2000s to participation within the American-insisted Palestinian political process; a process where Hamas confounded neoconservative American expectations in particular by handily winning the 2006 election. This forced the American-backed leader of the “Palestinian Authority” statelet, Mahmoud Abbas, to form a coalition government with Hamas, with Haniyeh as prime minister and an assembly led by another veteran Hamas leader, Abdul-Aziz Duwaik.

Yet behind the scenes, the United States, galled at a government with Hamas at its center, worked frantically through its liaison, Keith Dayton, to sabotage the coalition. Their principal conduit was unscrupulous militia commander Muhammad Dahlan, a ruthless opponent of Hamas since his promotion to security affairs in 1994. When Haniyeh survived an attempt on his life, Dahlan sneered that “the honor of assassinating” the Palestinian prime minister was one he could not claim. The sabotage eventually ruptured the Palestinian coalition entirely in the summer of 2007, when Hamas expelled Dahlan’s militia from Gaza in what was widely described as a “Hamas coup” – though further investigation showed, even to the irritation of dissident Fatah leaders, that it was in fact Dahlan whose attempted coup had forced Hamas to react.

In any case, the 2007 Gaza battle gave Abbas a pretext to end the coalition government, unilaterally sacking Haniyeh without parliamentary approval. With Gaza controlled by Hamas and the West Bank by Fatah, in effect, the Palestinian government had split down the middle. This left Haniyeh, in practice, the leader of an unofficial “emirate” in the Gaza Strip, over which Israel immediately stamped a crippling blockade punctuated with periodic mass assaults – in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021, and finally the genocide of 2023-24 – designed to intimidate the population and somehow force Hamas out.

Under this crippling blockade, Hamas was forced to find alternatives to keep the Gazan economy afloat: this involved a seemingly endless round of negotiations with a large number of international actors, including Turkiye, Qatar, Iran, Europe, and the United Nations, as well as various non-state actors. Haniyeh and Mashaal thus traveled widely – to the disparagement of Israel, which has sought to mischaracterize these diplomatic trips as evidence that Hamas’ leaders live in wealth abroad while their population suffers; a claim often aped like clockwork by Zionist media abroad. The United States, as Israel’s principal enabler, has parroted what it knows to be a false characterization of remorseless terrorists beholden to Iran – a claim in large part designed to undercut Arab support for Hamas, but which has had little public effect outside the courts of American-backed and frantically anti-Iran Gulf princes.

In fact, Haniyeh, and Hamas more broadly, had far more nuanced politics than these caricatures would allow. In Syria, for example, Hamas – and Haniyeh and Mashaal, personally – backed the 2012 uprising against an Iranian-backed regime, jeopardizing its ties with Tehran in the process. Even as its sympathies and ideological roots lay with the neighboring Ikhwan movement led by Mohamed Morsi, Hamas tried to maintain working ties with the subsequent Cairo dictatorship that ousted Morsi in the 2013 coup. Further afield, Hamas opposed both the September 2001 attacks on the United States, but also the subsequent American occupation of Afghanistan. Maintaining links with a large number of political groups, particularly though not exclusively of a consciously Islamic nature, the group also castigated the persecution of non-Muslims as inimical to Islam and has historically maintained good links with Christian Palestinians. While Hamas has been adamant that Palestine in its entirety belongs to its people, it has nonetheless agreed in principle to lengthy conditional truces with Israel.

Having played a key role in Hamas’ administration and foreign relations, in the latter 2010s Haniyeh was “promoted” to replace Mashaal as the group’s formal leader, his place taken in Gaza by the more militarily inclined Yahya Sinwar. Though there has frequently been speculation of a rift between Hamas’ “exterior” political wing and its “interior” military wing, in effect the group is disciplined enough that both wings have cooperated consistently on the group’s major issues: Haniyeh’s role in both the interior, as Gaza emir, and exterior, as Hamas emir is an indication of this collaboration. In his role as a former Palestinian prime minister, a diplomat, and an administrator, he will be hard for Hamas to replace – but if history is any indication, the loss will not be fatal to the Palestinian cause.

May Allah have mercy on His Slave.

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