When I went to meet Ismail Haniyeh for his last foreign interview in 2022, I was sent the address of a business park on the outskirts of Istanbul.
I expected this would just be the first “pin”, and I might be taken then to a second or third location. But to my surprise this was indeed the address of the office of the political leader of the terror group holding Gaza in its grip.
He was living quite openly, under the eye of the Turkish government.
The office – a simple, run-down building – was where Haniyeh later watched TV footage of October 7, celebrating the massacre carried out by his organisation.
At the time I met him, shortly after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, he wanted to talk. Priti Patel, then Britain’s home secretary, had just designated Hamas a terrorist organisation, and he wanted a chance to respond.
It had been five years since Haniyeh – assassinated in Tehran on Wednesday – left Gaza in 2017, handing over control inside the strip to Yahya Sinwar, and he was responsible for efforts to “soften” the image of the group to Palestinians and internationally.
Indeed, Haniyeh told me that Hamas was not a terror group – simply a group of freedom fighters seeking justice.
Everything about him sought to project the image of a statesman. Before we met, his staff had requested my CV. Inside the office, staff busied themselves constantly around him.
He wore a smart suit, lacking any outward sign of his politics, such as the traditional keffiyeh sported by Yasser Arafat. former leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.
In the 45-minute interview, he spoke softly and barely moved from behind his large desk. His rhetoric was mostly predictable.
He blamed the British for the fate of the Palestinians, harking back to the 1920-48 British Mandate, which would eventually lead to the creation of the Jewish state.
He even accused Ms Patel of designating Hamas a terrorist organisation in an attempt to become prime minister, and demanded an apology from the UK.
Born in the Shati refugee camp north of Gaza city, Haniyeh rose to become the protege of Hamas’ founder, sheikh Ahmad Yassin, who was assassinated by Israel in 2004.
He joined Hamas in 1987, when the group was founded during the first Palestinian Intifada (uprising).
In and out of Israeli prisons in the 1980s and 1990s, he was deported from Gaza to Lebanon in 1992, along with more than 400 others, before returning to the Strip the following year.
Long before he set himself up in the comforts of Doha and Istanbul, he was an advocate for Hamas, setting up a political party – foreseeing that it could be useful for legitimising the organisation.
In 2006, the year after Israel withdrew from Gaza, he became Palestinian prime minister. Soon after, Hamas seized total control of the Strip in a violent coup against the Palestinian Authority’s Fatah faction.
During his term, Haniyeh is alleged to have sequestered millions of dollars meant as aid for the Palestinian people. In exile, he clearly lived a life of luxury – far beyond what Gaza’s citizens could so much as dream of.
I asked him what he said to those who accuse him of hypocrisy. “I will return to Gaza,” he said, brusquely.
How much Haniyeh knew about the plans for October 7 remains unclear. The plan was drawn up by Sinwar and the military leadership inside Gaza.
But he was no naif. When I asked him in 2022 how he justified the training of hundreds of children in Hamas’s military summer camps every year, where young boys are taught urban combat, he called it “games”. He even smiled and told me the guns in the photos I reference are “toys”, “wooden guns”.
They were anything but when Hamas’ teenage recruits swarmed the border and butchered more than 1,000 Israeli citizens.
And Haniyeh was key to developing relations with Iran, which has funded and backed Hamas with ever greater largesse. When asked how many missiles Hamas retained after the 2021 war with Israel, he told me, “we are always ready for war”.
It came just weeks after he publicly thanked Iran for a donation of $70m to help build and develop missiles.
When Israeli airstrikes killed three of his sons and four of his children, he appeared unmoved. “The blood of martyrs creates hope for the future,” he said.
“Whoever thinks that by targeting my children during the negotiation talks and before a deal is agreed upon that it will force Hamas to back down on its demands, is delusional,” he added.
Throughout the ceasefire negotiations, Haniyeh has been viewed as the more moderate voice in Hamas’ leadership. But he was also not in control. Negotiators had grown tired of Haniyeh laying out positions that would then be disregarded or undermined by Sinwar, hiding out in the tunnels underneath Gaza.
Now, he has been killed in the one place he thought he was safe – in the heart of the Iranian regime in Tehran. While a team of bodyguards usually protected him, he had just one inside Iran.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, has vowed revenge for the assassination.
It remains to be seen if Haniyeh can achieve in death what he failed to in life – bringing the full might of the Iranian military into Hamas’ existential conflict with Israel.
Source Agencies
