Ismail Haniyeh

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pWotD Episode 2647: Ismail Haniyeh
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With 636,456 views on Wednesday, 31 July 2024 our article of the day is Ismail Haniyeh.
Ismail Haniyeh (1962/1963 – 31 July 2024) was a Palestinian political figure who was the political leader of the Hamas organization that has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007. From 2017 until his assassination in 2024, he had mostly lived in Qatar.
Haniyeh was born in the al-Shati refugee camp in the then Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip in 1962 or 1963, to parents who were expelled or fled from Ashkelon during the 1948 Palestine war. He gained a bachelor's degree in Arabic literature in 1987 from the Islamic University of Gaza, where he first became involved with Hamas after it was created during the First Intifada against the Israeli occupation, leading to his imprisonment for three short periods after having participated in protests. After his release in 1992, he was exiled to Lebanon, returning a year later to become a dean at Gaza's Islamic University. Haniyeh was appointed to head a Hamas office in 1997 and subsequently rose in the ranks of the organization.
Haniyeh was head of the Hamas list that won the Palestinian legislative elections of 2006, which campaigned on armed resistance against the Israeli occupation, and so became Prime Minister of the State of Palestine. However, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, dismissed Haniyeh from office on 14 June 2007. Due to the then-ongoing Fatah–Hamas conflict, Haniyeh did not acknowledge Abbas' decree and continued to exercise prime ministerial authority in the Gaza Strip. Haniyeh was the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip from 2006 until February 2017, when he was replaced by Yahya Sinwar. Haniyeh was seen as relatively one of the more pragmatic and moderate figures in Hamas.
On 6 May 2017, Haniyeh was elected chairman of Hamas's Political Bureau, replacing Khaled Mashal; at the time, Haniyeh relocated to Qatar from the Gaza Strip. Following the start of the Israel-Hamas war in late 2023, Israel declared its intention to assassinate all Hamas leaders. In early 2024, three of his sons and three grandchildren were killed in an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip. In May 2024, Karim Khan, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, announced his intention to apply for an arrest warrant for Haniyeh, and other Hamas leaders, for war crimes and crimes against humanity, as part of the ICC investigation in Palestine. On 31 July 2024, Haniyeh was assassinated, allegedly by an Israeli strike, in his residence in Tehran during his visit in Iran for the inauguration of its newly-elected president.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 01:29 UTC on Thursday, 1 August 2024.
For the full current version of the article, see Ismail Haniyeh on Wikipedia.
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