Ismail Haniyeh, the latest in a long line of senior Hamas leaders to be assassinated

Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ political figurehead since 2017, is emerging as the latest in a long list of senior leaders of the so-called Islamic Resistance Movement assassinated by Israel since it was founded in the late 1980s. So far Hamas, which has accused Israel of ordering the strike on Haniyeh in Tehran, has not announced who will fill the vacant position. The Israeli government has not acknowledged responsibility and rarely has it done so on the many other occasions it has carried out such operations on foreign soil.

In any case, there is little doubt that the main beneficiary of sidelining Haniyeh is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a staunch advocate of maintaining a hard line in the war in Gaza. Before becoming the head of the entire organization, Haniyeh had served as the leader of Hamas in Gaza since 2006 when the movement won elections in the Strip over Fatah, the main political arm of the Palestinian Authority (PA).

The security forces of the Jewish State pursue the senior leaders of the Palestinian armed resistance, sometimes for years, regardless of the fact that, as in the case of Haniyeh, they are part of the apparatus that has been trying for months to broker a ceasefire in a war that is now approaching 10 months in duration and which, with almost 40,000 Palestinian fatalities, is the bloodiest ever waged in Gaza.

In the Strip, the main theater of the conflict, the occupation troops have not succeeded in killing any of Hamas’ senior leaders. Israel attempted on July 13 to take out the movement’s military commander in Gaza, Mohamed Deif, the survivor of several assassination attempts and who Israel points to as one of the masterminds behind the massacre of 1,200 Israelis last October 7, but, as yet, he has not been confirmed to have been killed.

The last Hamas leader to be assassinated was the organization’s number two, Saleh al-Arouri, who was born in the West Bank in 1966. He was killed in an Israeli drone strike in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, on January 2. At that time, the current conflict was almost in its fourth month and Netanyahu’s government was trying to send the message that there would be no mercy for the leadership of the group that led the bloodiest attack against Israel since the birth of the Jewish state in 1948, which provided the trigger for the war in Gaza. But Hamas has long experience in substituting leaders eliminated by their enemies.

Twenty years ago, during the Second Intifada and in a period of less than a month, the founder and spiritual leader of the movement, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, 67, and his successor were both assassinated. Disabled from birth and wheelchair-bound, three missiles fired from an Apache helicopter killed Yassin early in the morning of March 23, 2004, as he was about to perform the first prayer of the day. Yassin had already been wounded the previous year in a similar operation.

At that time Hamas was taken over by its second-in-command, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, who rose to the top vowing to avenge the sheikh’s assassination and having already been targeted by Israeli troops, who had wounded him in a bombing raid months earlier. Israel hit their target on April 17, 2004, less than a month after al-Rantisi, a pediatrician, took the reins of Hamas. Shells fired from a helicopter gunship killed him at the age of 57. He was traveling in a vehicle with one of his six children and a bodyguard, who also died.

On July 22, 2002, a powerful bomb dropped from an F-16 fighter jet on a building in Gaza killed Hamas military chief Salah Shehade, born in 1953 and another influential member of the group since its founding. The air strike also killed his wife, nine children and half a dozen others. This is standard Israeli practice, which often ignores international humanitarian law and the prohibition on such actions even when it has an enemy leader in its sights.

During the convulsive period of the Intifada, on August 21, 2003, Israel killed another senior Hamas leader, Ismail Abu Shanab, in an air strike. “The assassination of Abu Shanab is also the assassination of the ceasefire and Hamas holds the Zionist enemy fully responsible for the consequences of this crime,” said Haniyeh at the time, when he had not yet climbed to the top of the fundamentalist organization’s political ladder.

In November 2012, Ahmed Jabari, then the all-powerful head of Hamas’ military wing, was killed in another so-called targeted assassination by the Israeli security forces. Jabari achieved his highest accolades inside Gaza and as an enemy of the Jewish State by setting himself up as jailer and negotiator for the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was held hostage for five years and finally returned home in 2011 after being exchanged for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in the most spectacular operation of its kind on record.

One of the keys to the assassination of Haniyeh will be its impact on the ceasefire negotiations that Hamas and Israel have been holding for months to free the 115 hostages still being held in the Strip, although some 40 of them are already presumed dead. On October 7, 2023, in addition to killing some 1,200 people in Israeli territory, the Hamas-led attackers took another 250 hostages. Just over 100 were released in the only week of truce in the war to date.

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