Understand who could replace Hamas political leader killed in Tehran explosion

Khaled Meshaal, who was appointed to be the new leader of Hamas, became known to the world in 1997 after Israeli agents poisoned him in a failed assassination attempt on a street outside his office in the Jordanian capital, Amman.

The attack on a senior figure in the Palestinian militant group, ordered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, so enraged Jordan’s then-King Hussein that he spoke of hanging the alleged killers and scrapping Jordan’s peace treaty with Israel unless the antidote was delivered.

Israel did so, and also agreed to release Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, only to assassinate him seven years later in Gaza.

For Israelis and Western states, the Iran-backed Hamas, which has led suicide attacks in Israel and frequently fought against it, is a terrorist group bent on Israel’s destruction.

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

Meshaal, 68, became Hamas’s political leader in exile a year before Israel tried to oust him, a role that allowed him to represent the Palestinian Islamist group in meetings with foreign governments around the world without being hampered by Israeli travel restrictions that have affected other Hamas officials.

Hamas sources said Meshaal is expected to be chosen as the group’s supreme leader to replace Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in Iran in the early hours of Wednesday (31), with Tehran and Hamas vowing revenge against Israel.

Khalil al-Hayya, a senior Hamas official who is in Qatar and led Hamas negotiators in indirect truce talks with Israel, has also been a possibility for the leadership as he is a favorite of Iran and its allies in the region.

Meshaal’s relations with Iran have been strained over his past support for the 2011 Sunni Muslim-led uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Israel has assassinated or attempted to kill several Hamas leaders and members since the group was founded in 1987 during the first Palestinian uprising against the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Meshaal has been a central figure at the top of Hamas since the late 1990s, though he has worked mostly from the relative safety of exile while Israel has plotted to assassinate other prominent Hamas figures based in the Gaza Strip.

After the wheelchair-bound Yassin was killed in an airstrike in March 2004, Israel assassinated his successor Abdel-Aziz Al-Rantissi in Gaza a month later, Meshaal assumed overall leadership of Hamas.

Like other Hamas leaders, Meshaal has grappled with the critical question of whether to adopt a more pragmatic approach to Israel’s pursuit of Palestinian sovereignty. Hamas’s 1988 charter calls for Israel’s destruction or fighting.

Softer stance on Israel

Meshaal rejects the idea of ​​a permanent peace deal with Israel, but said Hamas, which in the 1990s and 2000s sent suicide bombers to Israel, could accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem as a temporary solution in exchange for a long-term ceasefire.

The October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas-led militants in Gaza, which killed 1,200 people and led to the kidnapping of more than 250 people, according to Israeli figures, made the militant group’s priorities clear.

Israel retaliated with airstrikes and an invasion of Gaza that killed more than 39,000 Palestinians, in a campaign to eradicate Hamas that reduced much of the densely populated coastal enclave to rubble.

Meshaal said the Oct. 7 Hamas attack had put the Palestinian cause back on the world agenda. He called on Arabs and Muslims to join the fight against Israel and said the Palestinians would decide who would control Gaza after the current war ends, defying Israel and the United States that want to exclude Hamas from post-war governance.

Membership of the Muslim Brotherhood

Meshaal has lived most of his life outside the Palestinian territories. Born in Silwad, near the West Bank city of Ramallah, Meshaal moved as a boy with his family to the Gulf Arab state of Kuwait, a hotbed of pro-Palestinian sentiment.

At the age of 15, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest Islamic group in the Middle East. The Brotherhood was instrumental in the formation of Hamas in the late 1980s, during the first Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation.

Meshaal became a teacher before turning to the Hamas lobby abroad for many years, while other leaders of the group spent long periods in Israeli prisons.

He was in charge of international fundraising in Jordan when he narrowly escaped assassination.

Netanyahu played an accidental but important role in establishing Meshaal’s militant credentials when he ordered Mossad agents to kill him in 1997 in retaliation for a bombing of a Jerusalem market that killed 16 people and was blamed on Hamas.

The suspects were captured by Jordanian police after Meshaal was injected with poison on the street. Netanyahu, then in his first term as prime minister, was forced to hand over the antidote to the poison, and the incident turned Meshaal into a hero of the Palestinian resistance.

Jordan eventually closed the Hamas office in Amman and expelled Meshaal to the Gulf state of Qatar. He moved to Syria in 2001.

Meshaal led Hamas, a Sunni Muslim movement, from exile in Damascus from 2004 until 2012, when he fled the Syrian capital amid President Assad’s fierce crackdown on Sunnis involved in an uprising against him. Meshaal now divides his time between Doha and Cairo.

His abrupt departure from Syria initially weakened his position within Hamas, since ties with Damascus and Tehran, which were vital to the group, gave him power. With those ties damaged or broken, rivals based in Gaza, Hamas’s birthplace, began to assert their authority.

Meshaal told Reuters his action had damaged relations with Hamas’s main backer and arms supplier, Iran – a country Israel believes poses the biggest threat because of its ambitious nuclear program.

In December 2012, Meshaal made his first visit to the Gaza Strip and delivered the keynote speech at Hamas’ 25th anniversary. He had not visited the Palestinian territories since leaving the West Bank at age 11.

While he was abroad, Hamas asserted itself over its secular rival, the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, which has been open to negotiating peace with Israel, by seizing control of Gaza from the PA in a brief 2007 civil war.

Tensions between Meshaal and the Gaza-based Hamas leadership have emerged over their attempts to promote reconciliation with President Mahmoud Abbas, who heads the Palestinian Authority.

Meshaal then announced that he wanted to step down as leader over such tensions, and in 2017 he was replaced by his Gaza deputy, Haniyeh, who was elected to lead the group’s political bureau, also operating abroad.

In 2021, Meshaal was elected to lead Hamas’ office in the Palestinian diaspora.