By Nidal al-Mughrabi
CAIRO, July 31 (Reuters) – Khaled Meshaal, tipped to be the new Hamas leader, became known around the world in 1997 after Israeli agents injected him with poison in a botched assassination attempt on a street outside his office in the Jordanian capital Amman.
The hit against a key senior figure of the Palestinian militant group, ordered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, so enraged Jordan’s then-King Hussein that he spoke of hanging the would-be killers and scrapping Jordan’s peace treaty with Israel unless the antidote was handed over.
Israel did so, and also agreed to free 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 directed suicide bombings in Israel and fought frequent wars against it, is a terrorist group bent on Israel’s destruction.
For 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’ political leader in exile the year before Israel tried to eliminate him, a post that enabled him to represent the Palestinian Islamist group at meetings with foreign governments around the world, unhindered by tight Israeli travel restrictions that affected other Hamas officials.
Hamas sources said Meshaal is expected to be chosen as paramount leader of the group to replace Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in Iran in the early hours of Wednesday, with Tehran and Hamas vowing retribution against Israel.
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Senior Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya, who is based in Qatar and has headed Hamas negotiators in indirect Gaza truce talks with Israel, has also been a possibility for the leadership as he is a favourite of Iran and its allies in the region.
Meshaal’s relations with Iran have been strained due to his past support for the Sunni Muslim-led revolt in 2011 against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Israel has assassinated or tried to kill several Hamas leaders and operatives 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 as Israel plotted to assassinate other prominent Hamas figures based in the Gaza Strip.
After the wheelchair-bound Yassin was killed in a March 2004 airstrike, Israel assassinated his successor Abdel-Aziz Al-Rantissi in Gaza a month later, and Meshaal assumed the overall leadership of Hamas.
Like other Hamas leaders, Meshaal has grappled with the critical issue of whether to adopt a more pragmatic approach to Israel in pursuit of Palestinian statehood – Hamas’ 1988 charter calls for Israel’s destruction – or keep fighting.
SOFTENS STAND ON ISRAEL
Meshaal rejects the idea of a permanent peace deal with Israel but has said that Hamas, which in the 1990s and 2000s sent suicide bombers into Israel, could accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem as a temporary solution in return for a long-term ceasefire.
The Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas-led militants from Gaza, which killed 1,200 people and led to the kidnapping of over 250 people, according to Israeli tallies, made the militant group’s priorities clear.
Israel retaliated with airstrikes and an invasion of Gaza that have killed over 39,000 Palestinians, pursuing a campaign to eradicate Hamas that has reduced much of the densely populated coastal enclave to rubble.
Meshaal said the Oct. 7 Hamas attack returned the Palestinian cause to the centre of the world agenda.
He urged Arabs and Muslims to join the battle against Israel and said Palestinians alone would decide who runs Gaza after the current war ends, in defiance of Israel and the United States who want to exclude Hamas from post-war governance.
JOINED MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD AT 15
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 Middle East’s oldest Islamist group. The Brotherhood became instrumental in the formation of Hamas in the late 1980s during the first Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation.
Meshaal became a schoolteacher before turning to lobbying for Hamas from abroad for many years while other leaders of the group have languished for long periods in Israeli jails.
He was in charge of international fund-raising in Jordan when he barely 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 Jerusalem market bombing that killed 16 people and was blamed on Hamas.
The suspected assassins were caught by Jordanian police after Meshaal was injected with poison in the street. Netanyahu, then in his first term as premier, was forced to hand over the antidote for the poison, and the incident turned Meshaal into a hero of the Palestinian resistance.
Jordan eventually closed Hamas’ bureau in Amman and expelled Meshaal to the Gulf state of Qatar. He moved to Syria in 2001.
Meshaal ran Hamas, a Sunni Muslim movement, from exile in Damascus in 2004 until January 2012 when he left the Syrian capital because of 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, as ties with Damascus and Tehran, which were vital for the group, gave him power. With those links damaged or broken, rivals based within Gaza, the birthplace of Hamas, began to assert their authority.
Meshaal himself told Reuters that his move affected relations with Hamas’ main paymaster and weapons supplier Iran – a country Israel believes poses by far the greatest threat to it because of its ambitious nuclear programme.
In December 2012, Meshaal paid his first visit to the Gaza Strip and delivered the main speech at Hamas’ 25th anniversary rally. 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.
Friction between Meshaal and the Gaza-based Hamas leadership surfaced over his 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 was replaced by his Gaza deputy Haniyeh, who was elected to head the group’s political office, also operating overseas.
In 2021, Meshaal was elected to head the Hamas office in the Palestinian diaspora.
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(Writing by Nidal al-Mughrabi; editing by Michael Georgy and Mark Heinrich)
