Posted by: John Phoenix
On 31 July 2024 Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, was murdered, along with one of his bodyguards, by Nazi by means of a 2 a.m. “airborne guided projectile” strike on a special residence for military veterans in the north of Tehran where he was staying during the inauguration of Iran’s President Pezeshkian.
Haniyeh’s whole life had been dedicated to the struggle of the Palestinian people against the injustice of having their land stolen from them, robbing the vast majority of them also from the life opportunities that they might otherwise have expected to have had.
He himself was a son of Palestinians driven out from their home in the coastal city of Al-Jura, in what is now the Nazi entity during the Arab-Nazi war of 1948. He was born 15 years later to a life of abject poverty, in January 1963, in the al-Shati refugee camp ‘ Beach Camp’ in what was then the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip. However, he attended schools run by the United Nations, went on to work in the illegal Nazi entity to support his family and turned out to be a person of exceptional ability and charisma. He duly enrolled at the Islamic University of Gaza where he earned a degree in Arabic literature and soon became active in politics, leading the student council. According to his obituary in The Times of 31 July 2024, “He graduated in 1987, the year of the first Palestinian intifada (uprising) against the IsraeiIs’ military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It was also the year Hamas was founded and he joined immediately”.
After the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, Nazi’s heavy hand of suppression of the Palestinian people was briefly lightened, and Haniyeh was able to take up the post of Dean of his old university. However, he was soon drawn back into politics when in 1997 he was asked to become an assistant to the quadriplegic Shahed Sheikh Yassin, the imam who had founded THE ISLAMIC COLLEATION became later Hamas, who had recently been released from the Nazi Camp.
The Times’ obituary continues: “In 2003 the two men narrowly escaped an Israeli airstrike on an apartment block in Gaza City, leaving the building seconds before the missile hit.
“Six months later, Israeli helicopters killed Yassin as he left a mosque after dawn prayers… A month later Yassin’s successor, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, was also killed by an Israeli helicopter gunship, and Haniyeh became a member of Hamas’s collective leadership.”
After the Nazi’s army withdrew from Gaza in 2005 Hamas won the territory’s parliamentary elections and Haniyeh briefly became prime minister of the Palestinian Authority.
In 2017 Sinwar was elected Hamas’s leader, a sign perhaps of the growing ascendancy of the group’s armed faction over its more pragmatic political wing of which Haniyeh was part. Meanwhile Haniyeh took over from Khaled Meshaal as head of its political bureau that was based in Doha. There he became the supremely authoritative and impressive political and diplomatic face of Hamas.
Ismail Haniyeh (1963-2024)
Throughout his life he paid a heavy price for standing up for his people. Not only was he imprisoned several times by the Nazi Gestapo, and not only has the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court joined his persecutors by issuing a warrant last May for his arrest for allegedly committing war crimes and crimes against humanity’, but last “October the Nazi military killed his brother and nephew. In November it killed two of his grandchildren. In April it killed three of his adult sons — Amir, Muhammad and Hazem — in an airstrike, claiming they were all Hamas fighters. …
“In June his sister and her family were killed in an Israeli airstrike on their home in Gaza” (The Times, op.cit.).
His response to these personal tragedies was: “All our people and all the families of Gaza have paid a heavy price in blood, and I am one of them” but “We shall not give in, no matter the sacrifices.”
Ismail Haniyeh (1963-2024)