In 2006, he was elected prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, and later took control of the Gaza Strip - who was Ismail Haniya, the leader of Hamas killed in Tehran?
The positions of Ismail Haniya, the political leader of Hamas, who was killed yesterday in Tehran, are strongest in the spring of 2006. Then Hamas won the first and only elections in the Palestinian territories. Not with much, but with enough for Ismail Hania to become prime minister, writes ARD. Before that, Israel, under the leadership of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, withdrew its army from the Gaza Strip and destroyed Israeli settlements.
The construction of totalitarian rule
Then in 2007, the Palestinian branch of the "Muslim Brotherhood" - Hamas displaced the secular party Fatah from the coastal areas, took over the administrative power in the Palestinian Authority and under Haniya's leadership built a totalitarian rule in Gaza, reports ARD.
Resistance and civil resistance are relentlessly pursued. In the basements and interrogation tunnels of Hamas, inconvenient people are tortured and sometimes publicly executed.
Relations with Iran
It was Haniya who early on established ties with the Shia regime in Tehran, thus making an ever closer pact with Israel's sworn enemy, ARD notes. He is looking to Iran for geopolitical protection, as well as lasting logistical and financial support for weapons and ammunition.
In February 2012, for example, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave Haniya a particularly solemn reception during one of his first major appearances in Tehran.
Internal struggles in Hamas
Hania is losing out in the internal power struggles within Hamas to Yahya Sinuar - the man I believe to be the main culprit behind the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel that killed hundreds of civilians. In 2017, Haniya left the Gaza Strip and went to Doha, as the head of the political bureau of Hamas, the German public-law media also reports.
Before that, the Qatari rulers, who have long provided financial support to Hamas in the Gaza Strip, asked the US and Israel if they could accept Haniya, Clemens Ferrenkote from ARD also writes.
What binds Haniya and Sinuar is their intense hatred of Israel. The October 7 terrorist attack was described by the exiled head of Hamas' political bureau as "opening the door to the establishment of a Palestinian state". The horrific attack had "raised the Palestinian flag to an unprecedented level".
For Chania, the suffering of its own population, caused by the wars in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021 and most recently 2023, apparently does not matter at all.
Favorite of Hamas founder
Ismail Haniya is the son of a refugee family from the village of Al Yura near Ashkelon. During his studies in the 1980s at the Islamic University of the Gaza Strip, he became politically active. Then, during the First Intifada of the late 1980s, he was repeatedly arrested by Israeli security forces.
Hania joined the recently founded Hamas organization, and in 1992 he was deported from Israel to Lebanon. There, Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin took him under his wing. Yasin is from the same village as Hania's parents. It quickly becomes his favorite.
After Yassin was killed in an Israeli army airstrike in 2004, Haniya, then 42, rose to the top of the Hamas hierarchy. Now it remains to be seen who will take his place.