“If one leader leaves, another will come,” Hamas chief said before his death

As if he knew his time had come, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s last words to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Ali Khamenei, before he was assassinated in Tehran were a verse from the Quran about life, death, immortality and resilience.

“It is Allah who gives life and causes death. And Allah is aware of all actions… ‘If one leader goes, another will arise,’” Haniyeh said in Arabic. A few hours later, he was killed in an alleged Israeli attack on his guest house.

The comment, broadcast on television as Haniyeh addressed Khamenei, reflected deeply held Islamic beliefs that have shaped his life and approach to the Palestinians’ conflict with Israel, inspired by the late Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who preached holy struggle (jihad) against Israel in the 1980s.

Israel arrested and assassinated Yassin in 2004, but Hamas has grown to become a powerful military force.

In an interview with Reuters in Gaza in 1994, Haniyeh, who was buried in Qatar on Friday (2), said Yassin taught them that Palestinians can only regain their occupied homeland through “the purified weapons of their men and their struggle”.

No Muslim should die in his bed while “Palestine” remains occupied, he said, quoting Yassin.

To Palestinian supporters, Haniyeh and the rest of the Hamas leadership are fighters for liberation from Israeli occupation, keeping their cause alive when international diplomacy has failed them.

He said he learned from Sheikh Yassin “love for Islam and sacrifice for this Islam and not to kneel before tyrants and despots.”

Haniyeh has become the hard-line face of the Palestinian group’s international diplomacy as the war has raged in Gaza, where three of his sons — Hazem, Amir and Mohammad — and four of his grandchildren were killed in an airstrike in April. At least 60 other members of his family have also been killed in the Gaza war.

“The blood of my children is not more valuable than the blood of the children of the Palestinian people… All the martyrs of Palestine are my children,” he said after his death.

“Through the blood of the martyrs and the pain of the wounded, we create hope, we create the future, we create independence and freedom for our people,” he said. “We say to the occupation that this blood will only make us firmer in our principles and in our attachment to our land.”

“Normalization will not end the conflict”

Appointed to Hamas’ top post in 2017, Haniyeh has moved between Turkey and the Qatari capital Doha, escaping travel restrictions from the blockaded Gaza Strip and allowing him to act as a negotiator in ceasefire talks or to speak with Hamas ally Iran.

“All the normalization agreements that you (Arab states) signed with (Israel) will not end this conflict,” Haniyeh declared shortly after the attack by Hamas fighters on October 7 that killed 1,200 people in Israel and took 250 hostage.

Israel’s response to the attack has been a military campaign that has killed some 40,000 people inside Gaza and has bombed much of the enclave, leaving the region in rubble.

In May, the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s office requested arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, including Haniyeh, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on charges of alleged war crimes. Israeli and Palestinian leaders have rejected the charges.

Haniyeh is the third Hamas leader assassinated by Israel in the past two decades. Israel killed Sheikh Yassin and his successor Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi within a month of each other in helicopter airstrikes in 2004.

Khaled Meshaal, who was tipped to succeed Haniyeh as leader, escaped a failed assassination attempt ordered by Netanyahu in 1997.

Adeeb Ziadeh, an expert on Palestinian affairs at Qatar University, said Hamas is an ideology and that Haniyeh’s assassination will not end the group or make it surrender.

“Every time Hamas lost a leader, another leader emerged, sometimes even stronger in his performance and in upholding Hamas principles,” Ziadeh said.

Israel said on Thursday that Mohammed Deif, one of the masterminds of the Oct. 7 attack, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza last month. Saleh Al-Arouri, a founder of Hamas’ military wing, was also killed in a drone strike in the southern suburbs of Beirut in January 2024.

Military force

Hamas’s 1988 founding charter called for Israel’s destruction, although Hamas leaders have at times offered a long-term truce with Israel in exchange for a viable Palestinian state in all territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. Israel considers this a ruse.

In the decades that followed, Hamas fired thousands of rockets at Israel and fought several wars with the Israeli military, while steadily increasing its ranks and military strength. Hamas also sent suicide bombers into Israel in the 1990s and 2000s.

In 2012, when asked by Reuters whether Hamas had abandoned the armed struggle, Haniyeh replied “of course not” and said resistance would continue “in all forms – popular resistance, political resistance, diplomatic resistance and military resistance”.

Yet for all the tough language, in public, Arab diplomats and officials saw him as relatively moderate compared with more hard-line members of the Iran-backed group inside Gaza, where the military wing of Hamas led by Yahya Sinwar planned the Oct. 7 attack.

At the same time as he told the Israeli military that it would “drown in the sands of Gaza,” he and his predecessor, Khaled Meshaal, traveled to the region for negotiations on a Qatari-brokered ceasefire deal with Israel that includes the exchange of hostages for Palestinians in Israeli prisons.

However, Haniyeh, a Sunni Muslim, has had a greater influence in building Hamas’s fighting capacity, in part by cultivating ties with Shiite Muslim Iran, which has made no secret of its military and financial support for the group.

When he left Gaza in 2017, Haniyeh was succeeded as Hamas leader in the territory by Sinwar, a hardliner who spent more than two decades in Israeli prisons.