BEIRUT – Ismail Haniyeh was the international face of Hamas, its top leader in exile who kept up the militant group’s ties with allies around the region. At the head of its political hierarchy, he had little military role – but Israel marked him for death after the surprise Oct. 7 attacks.
The 62-year-old Haniyeh was killed in an airstrike Wednesday during a visit to one of Hamas’ most crucial allies, Iran, after attending the inauguration of its new president. Iran and Hamas both accused Israel, which has not commented on the strike.
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The assassination would make him the highest-level Hamas official killed by Israel since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks, when militants killed 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages. The Israel-Hamas war that followed has become the deadliest and longest in the Arab-Israeli conflict. More than 39,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to health officials in Gaza.
Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s political bureau, had been in self-imposed exile from Gaza since 2019 and was often seen as a relative moderate in the group. He was one of the few Hamas leaders who said the group, while it rejects recognizing Israel, doesn't oppose a two-state solution. Based in Qatar and often moving around the region, he didn’t have a direct hand in the group’s military wing, known as the Qassam Brigades, but often coordinated between it and political branches.
It is not known what he knew about the military wing’s plan to break out of tightly closed Gaza and attack surrounding communities in southern Israel. The plan was masterminded inside Gaza, likely by Hamas’ leader on the ground Yahya Sinwar and the head of the military wing Mohammed Deif. A Hamas official told the AP only a handful of its commanders on the ground knew about the “zero hour.”
But after the carnage caught Israeli military and intelligence by surprise, Haniyeh embraced the attack, praising it as a humiliating blow to Israel’s aura of invincibility. Within hours, he appeared in a video leading prayers with other Hamas officials thanking God for the attack’s success.
“The Al-Aqsa flood was an earthquake that struck the heart of the Zionist entity and has made major changes at the world level,” Haniyeh said in a speech in Iran during the funeral of late Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in May. “Al-Aqsa flood” was Hamas' code name for the Oct. 7 attack.
“We will continue the resistance against this enemy until we liberate our land, all our land,” Haniyeh said.
Michael Milshtein, a Hamas expert at Tel Aviv University, said Haniyeh had a commanding role in 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,” said Milshtein, a former military intelligence officer. “From time to time, Sinwar even laughed and joked: ‘He’s the more moderate, sophisticated leader, but he doesn’t understand anything about warfare.’”
Still, Israel pledged to kill all of Hamas’ leaders after the attacks, and Haniyeh was high on its list.
Haniyeh was also under the eye of the International Criminal Court, whose chief prosecutor sought arrest warrants against him, Sinwar and Deif for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Similar requests were issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Since 2018, the U.S. had designated Haniyeh as a terrorist, saying he was closely linked to Hamas' military wing.
The threats did not prevent Haniyeh from traveling. He visited Turkey and Iran throughout the war. From Doha, he participated in the negotiations meant to bring about a cease-fire and free the hostages.
Israel’s retaliation cost him his closest relatives. Strikes in April and last month killed three of his sons, four of his grandchildren and one of his sisters. Haniyeh said Israel was acting in “the spirit of revenge and murder.”
Haniyeh was born in Gaza’s urban Shati refugee camp to parents who were forced out of the town of Majdal – now the city of Ashkelon in Israel – during the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation. Five years after his birth, Israel captured Gaza in the 1967 war, and he grew up under its occupation of the strip.
He joined Hamas when it was founded in 1987 as the “Intifada,” or first major mass Palestinian uprising against Israel’s rule, erupted. He served as an aide to Ahmad Yassin, the group’s founder, as the group broke from other groups and began conducting armed attacks on Israeli troops in the occupied territories.
Haniyeh was detained by Israeli troops in 1989 for Hamas membership and spent three years in prison. In 1992, he was deported to Lebanon with a group of top Hamas officials and founders. He later returned to the Gaza Strip following the 1993 interim peace accords, which were signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization.
That year, Hamas turned to a campaign of suicide bombings against civilians in Israel aimed at thwarting the accords — which now have been stagnant for years.
After Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, Hamas won Palestinian legislative elections in the following year, and Haniyeh was named prime minister in the Palestinian government. Deeply religious and versed in Arabic literature from his university studies, he was known for his flowery rhetoric in his speeches.
But frictions between Hamas and Fatah, the main faction behind the Palestinian Authority, quickly erupted into fighting. Hamas drove the PA out of Gaza and seized power there in 2007 causing a split that has endured since.
While the PA ruled in enclaves of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Haniyeh became prime minister in Gaza. That made him the lead man in Hamas's first effort at governing, as it clamped down control. Conditions and poverty worsened under an Israel-Egyptian blockade.
Eventually, he was named Hamas’ top political leader, replacing Khaled Mashaal in 2017, and soon after went into exile.
Hani Masri, a veteran Palestinian analyst who met Haniyeh several times, said Haniyeh’s personality was a natural fit for his political role in Doha. He described him as sociable and well-spoken.
Still, some Palestinians in Gaza resented Haniyeh’s distance from their woes inside the beleaguered territory. Israel often seized on that, portraying him and other Hamas leaders as living in luxury in Doha hotels while Palestinians suffer.
Iranian media on Wednesday quoted a past speech by Haniyeh in which he said the Palestinian cause has “costs.”
“We are ready for these costs: martyrdom for the sake of Palestine, and for the sake of God Almighty, and for the sake of the dignity of this nation.”
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Associated Press writers Jack Jeffery in Ramallah, West Bank and Melanie Lidman in Tel Aviv, Israel, contributed to this report.
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This article corrects Haniyeh’s age when he died. He was 62.