Saleh al-Arouri: Hamas’ chief negotiator and a loose cannon in the Palestinian Islamist group

The death of Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut — in an attack in which even the U.S. sees the hand of Israel, although the Israeli government has not officially confirmed its involvement — represents for Hamas the loss of one of its most skilled cadres in exile, who had led negotiations with other Palestinian factions, with Israeli authorities, and with various international allies, as well as one of those mainly responsible for the Palestinian Islamist organization’s finances. He was also a loose cannon who had gone so far as to order armed actions on his own, without consulting the rest of the Hamas leadership.

Instead of a top-down leadership and strict hierarchy, Hamas has several centers of power and decision-making given its dual nature as a political movement and an armed group, and the different geographies and circumstances in which its leaders operate: government in Gaza, clandestine opposition in the West Bank, and more or less public activity in exile depending on the country they are in, and the current status of those countries’ relations with Israel. Hence, at times, the statements of its leaders seem contradictory and, on many occasions, the left hand of the organization does not know what the right hand is doing. Al-Arouri had acted as both.

Born in Ramallah in 1966, he became involved in the Islamic Resistance Movement in the late 1980s, when he was a student at Hebron University, characterizing himself as a skilled volunteer recruiter and fundraiser. He was also one of the Hamas leaders who contributed to the establishment of the organization’s armed wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, in the West Bank, according to the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank’s map of Palestinian leaders and organizations.

Al-Arouri was arrested several times by the Israeli authorities and spent lengthy periods in prison, the longest between 1992 and 2007, when he became a spokesman for Palestinian prisoners and an interlocutor with the Israeli prison authorities. Upon his release — during negotiations between Fatah and Hamas over a shared government — al-Arouri stated in an interview with the British newspaper The Telegraph that his organization should stop targeting civilians and move “from a military-oriented party” to “a political movement.” This did not prevent Israel from imprisoning him again for almost three years, at the end of which he was deported.

Al-Arouri went to Damascus where the political bureau — i.e. the civilian leadership of Hamas, protected by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad — was then based, and rose to occupy second place behind the then-political leader of the Palestinian group, Khaled Mashaal. But, in 2012, Hamas — a Sunni Islamist organization — distanced itself from the Shiite Syrian regime’s crackdown on the demonstrations that had begun the previous year and sided with the mostly Sunni rebels. Al-Arouri left Syria and as such one of the fundamental pieces of the so-called “Axis of Resistance,” led by Iran and articulated by Syria, the Lebanese Hezbollah party-militia and the Shiite militias of Iraq, as well as Palestinian Islamist groups, was dismantled.

Refuge in Turkey

Some of the Hamas leaders settled in Qatar; others, such as al-Arouri, ended up in Turkey, where the government of moderate Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdogan offered them refuge. The arrival of Hamas leaders came about, according to local analysts, as part of a pact between Turkish and Israeli authorities following Ankara’s mediation in the case of Israeli soldier Guilad Shalit, kidnapped by Hamas in 2006 and released in 2011 in exchange for the release of more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners (al-Arouri also participated in these negotiations).

In Istanbul, al-Arouri began to amass power. He led the Hamas delegation in successive Turkish-sponsored attempts to reconcile with Fatah and the Palestinian National Authority. It was also around this time that the groundwork began to be laid for Hamas investments in Turkey (recently, the U.S. placed the Turkish construction company Trend GYO, which is accused of being a financing vehicle for the Palestinian organization, on its sanctions list). Although it is unclear what the role of Hamas’ number two in these dealings was, the U.S. Treasury blacklisted him in 2015 as one of Hamas’ key economic managers, responsible “for sending hundreds of thousands of dollars” to the group’s cells in the West Bank “for the purchase of weapons.”

Around that time, al-Arouri also began acting on his own. In June 2014, three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and killed in the West Bank. Israel claimed that the perpetrators were Hamas members, leaked to the press that al-Arouri had masterminded the attack, and launched a bombing campaign on Gaza that left more than 2,000 people dead, mostly civilians. The Hamas leadership in Qatar denied that their group had anything to do with the attack, but, to the surprise of many, al-Arouri called a press conference in Turkey in which he acknowledged responsibility: “The popular will [...] culminated in the heroic operation of the al-Qassam Brigades in imprisoning the three settlers in Hebron.” A year later, the Turkish Foreign Ministry stated categorically: “Al-Arouri is not in Turkey.”

After pressure from the United States and Israel — a country with which Turkey was trying to restore diplomatic relations — Ankara decided to expel him. The Hamas number two, however, did not go to Doha, where the other heavyweights of the organization were, but settled in Lebanon.

There, as head of the Hamas office in Beirut, he once again brought out his negotiating skills. In 2017, after successive interviews with Iranian and Lebanese representatives, he appeared with the leader of Hezbollah, Hasan Nasrallah, to announce the restoration of relations, broken due to differences over the Syrian civil war. A fundamental piece in the puzzle of Iranian influence in the region was thus recomposed.

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