The first and the only time I interviewed Ismail Haniyeh, the late head of Hamas’ political bureau, was in January 2006 in Gaza, on the day of the fateful elections for the Palestinian parliament, shortly after exit poll results were published.
Like every other member of Hamas, Haniyeh was overwhelmed by this unexpected victory. Hamas had been aiming for a significant increase in power in the parliament, but they did not expect an outright victory. Haniyeh nevertheless sounded extremely smug and full of himself. He ordered me and a few other female journalists present in the room to cover our heads, although he was not a cleric. Many other Hamas leaders never made such a demand. During the interview, he promised that under Hamas leadership, Gaza and the Palestinian people would conquer new heights and he personally promised to follow in the footsteps of the “martyrs” – Sheikh Ahmad Yassin and Dr. Abd al-Aziz al-Rantisi, two Hamas founders who were assassinated in the course of spring 2004.
During a rule that formally lasted 18 years (and informally 20 years since he inherited the political leadership of Hamas after Rantisi’s assassination), Haniyeh definitely took Gaza to new heights of failure, misery and devastation while enriching himself and his family.
Who was this man publicly mourned by the governments of Iran, Turkey and Qatar but cursed by many ordinary Palestinians and many others?
Humble Origins, Quick Rise to Power
Born in 1962 in al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza to a family of refugees from al-Jura village, located next to the Israeli town of Ashkelon, Haniyeh grew up in poverty. His father, a fisherman, died when he was still a child and as a youngster, he worked in construction in Israel to support his family.
At the time, it was impossible to imagine this tall young man, who studied Arabic literature at the Islamic University of Gaza and played football, would become a terrorist, a billionaire and a powerful political leader.
Danny Makhlouf, an Israeli building contractor from Ashkelon who used to employ young Ismail back in 1978, described him as an honest and hard working man. “He was at my daughter’s wedding at the time. And we went to visit them. When I heard that he got involved in terror, I drove to Gaza in order to talk to him so he would quit terror,” Makhlouf told Maariv newspaper back in 2018. Apparently, this fatherly advice didn’t help.
Haniyeh got involved in politics early on – he was active in the Muslim Brotherhood movement as a university student. During the first intifada (1988-1992), he joined Hamas and anti-Israeli protests in the Strip, landing him in an Israeli prison where he served a three-year sentence.
Ismail Haniyeh became one of the terror group’s young stars. In 1992 he was exiled to southern Lebanon along with hundreds of top activists. Under heavy American pressure, Israeli Prime Minister Rabin repatriated the exiled group back to Israel. Upon return to Gaza, he was appointed dean of the Islamic University. In 1997, Haniyeh began serving as the right hand of Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, and became the head of his office. Proximity to Yassin did wonders for his career: after both Yassin and Rantisi were assassinated, Haniyeh became a de-facto leader of Gaza.
Following Hamas’ win in the 2006 elections, he was appointed to the post of Palestinian Authority prime minister. Sixteen months later when Hamas overthrew the Palestinian Authority in Gaza in a coup d’état, Haniyeh had already been sacked from this job by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Haniyeh declined to recognize the legitimacy of this decree and became prime minister of the Hamas-led government of Gaza and the political leader of Hamas in Palestine.
The Making of an Extremist
“We do not have any feelings of animosity toward Jews. We do not wish to throw them into the sea. All we seek is to be given our land back, not to harm anybody,” Ismail Haniyeh told Newsweek back in 2006, soon after the Palestinian parliamentary elections. Thus began a narrative in the West that Haniyeh was moderate, open to negotiations and even to some form of peace settlement with Israel. Yet, Hamas under Haniyeh refused the conditions set by the roadmap of the international Quartet on the Middle East – a halt to terrorist activity and acceptance of Israel.
In 2006, the same Ismail Haniyeh vowed not to recognize Israel during a visit to Iran and during a 2012 visit to Tunisia promised to continue the armed struggle and never cede a single part of Palestine.
Before and after the elections of January 2006, Haniyeh promised the Palestinians that Hamas had a development plan for Gaza, that international aid would be plentiful, and that the Palestinian state would soon be a reality. But the group’s military activity ensured that life in Gaza would become much more difficult. By June 2006, terrorists came out of a tunnel into Israel and kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit back to Gaza. Hamas increased the shelling of Israeli border towns with Qassam rockets, and built more underground tunnels for both smuggling and military purposes. One of the results of this policy was Israel’s maritime blockade to prevent the smuggling of weapons on a commercial scale.
Pivot to Iran and a New Lifestyle
The romance between Iran and Hamas began in the 1990s, when Hamas leaders were expelled for one year to southern Lebanon and then during the end of the decade, when some of its leadership moved to Damascus. At the time, it was an uneasy romance between a hardcore Sunni movement and a Shi’a fundamentalist Iranian regime. In 1998, after his visit to Tehran Sheikh Yassin said that “the Islamic Republic of Iran supports this ideal [of a Palestinian state] even more than the Palestinians themselves.” Yassin later added that Iran seems to be “prepared to extend all kinds of aid to the Palestinian people’s struggle for liberation,” yet, at the same time sources close to him indicated that he was always wary of the Iranians and preferred to seek funding elsewhere (Iran is said to have supported Hamas financially at least from 1995).
His aide and successor Ismael Haniyeh had a different opinion. Under his leadership, Iran increased funding. Haniyeh visited Iran in 2012 to prevent a distancing over the civil war in Syria, where Iran and Hamas supported opposite sides, after the organization left Damascus owing to its overt support of anti-Assad Syrian rebels.
In January 2020, Haniyeh attended the funeral of Iran’s Quds Force chief, Qasem Soleimani. Reportedly, this visit angered Egypt’s government. Haniyeh’s deputy Khalil al-Hayya admitted that this visit had caused tensions with Egypt, which is allied with Iran’s regional rival Saudi Arabia. “Our brothers in Egypt rebuked us for visiting Iran, but [Hamas] has its own independent stance,” al-Hayya said, saying the visit strengthened “the relationship between Hamas and Iran.”
So while Gaza-based Yahya Sinwar was rightfully labeled an extremist, Ismail Haniyeh, who traveled abroad and dressed in expensive suits, was deemed to be a more moderate figure. The truth is that both worked for the same goal – turning the Gaza Strip into a large military base and Hamas into an army that trained to kidnap Israelis, take over Israeli border communities and shell Israeli towns with technologies provided with the help of Tehran.
A word about those fancy suits. Although Hamas ran in 2006 on an anti-corruption ticket, very soon it became just as corrupt as the nationalist Fatah movement. According to Gazans critical of Hamas, they went much, much further.
Back in 2010, Haniyeh spent four million US dollars to buy a plot of land on the Gazan beachfront near al-Shati refugee camp where he grew up. He registered the land under his son-in-law’s name, according to the Egyptian magazine Rose al-Yusuf. Since then, he purchased several apartments, villas and buildings in the Gaza Strip and registered the property in the names of some of his 13 children.
According to Arab media reports, Haniyeh was married at various times to between seven to nine wives and had 13 children. His children enjoyed hedonistic lifestyles, drank alcohol abroad and controlled the real estate market in Gaza.
Publicly, he pledged to survive on olive oil and za’atar (dried herbs) while in private he kept amassing enormous wealth. This disparity between an average Gazan struggling to provide for his family and the well-dressed Haniyeh living in luxury hotels in Doha and Istanbul drew criticism. Gazans who dared to expose the corruption of Hamas leaders were arrested.
Was Haniyeh a Moderate?
Under Haniyeh’s rule, Hamas increased the shelling of Israeli towns and kibbutzim near Gaza, planned military operations using underground tunnels, tried to stir an intifada in the West Bank and set up an oppressive regime for the Palestinians in Gaza. Haniyeh was not “moderate” in any context, though some Western media outlets depicted him as such. His successor, however, looks even worse.
Just little over a week after Haniyeh’s assassination, Hamas announced that Yahya Sinwar, the architect of October 7, is the new head of the political bureau. Sinwar will be different than his predecessors, Khaled Masha’al and Ismail Haniyeh: isolated in his Gaza tunnel, hard to reach, hungry to keep all power in his own hands. Sinwar wishes to consolidate the organization’s power that used to be dispersed among leaders in Gaza, West Bank, Israeli prisons and the diaspora. This move will complicate the hostage deal. At the same time, Sinwar’s uncompromising and zealous type of leadership might bring the end of Hamas closer, for Sinwar will not listen to any voices of reason, but will seek death and destruction, for Hamas and for the entire region.
History teaches us that figures deemed to be moderate were either pushed out by Hamas leadership, like the academic and former deputy prime minister of the Palestinian Authority Nasser al-Shaer, or were apparently radicalized and became extremists, like the former Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hammad, who was close to Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin (though possibly he was never really moderate to begin with).
Any successor to Sinwar and Haniyeh will need to secure Iranian funding and show that he wasn’t mellowed by the current lengthy war with Israel. As long as Hamas remains an Iranian client, any talk of its “moderation” is irrelevant. Whoever succeeds the vicious Sinwar or Haniyeh, the terrorist in an expensive suit, will follow in their footsteps.
