Ismail Haniyeh*
Ismail Haniyeh (إسماعيل هنية), born in 1963 in Gaza’s Shati refugee camp, was a senior member of Hamas who served as Palestinian prime minister between 2006-2007. He headed Hamas’s Politburo from 2017 until his assassination in an Israeli airstrike during a visit to Tehran in July 2024. Within Hamas he was a strong proponent for a Gaza ceasefire deal with Israel.
Haniyeh headed Hamas’s “Change and Reform” parliamentary bloc which won the 2006 legislative election. Following this, he became Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority government until his dismissal by President Mahmoud Abbas in 2007 — a move that deepened the political conflict between Fatah and Hamas. In 2014, he signed the Shati reconciliation agreement with Fatah on behalf of Hamas.
In August 2017, he led a high-level Hamas delegation to Iran where he met with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, marking a renewal of warm relations following a falling out over Iranian involvement in the Syrian civil war.
Ismail Haniyeh first rose to prominence as a close associate of Hamas’s founder and spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. He served several sentences in Israeli prisons in the 1980s and 1990s, and was deported from Gaza to Lebanon in 1992 along with 400 other figures and activists, before returning to Gaza the following year.