Khaled Mashaal was tapped to be the new Hamas leader on Wednesday, replacing Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in Tehran early Wednesday morning.
Hamas sources said Mashaal is expected to be chosen as the paramount leader of the terror group to replace Ismail Haniyeh, who was eliminated in Iran in the early hours of Wednesday.
Senior Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya, who is based in Qatar and has headed Hamas negotiators in indirect hostage deal talks with Israel, has also been a possibility for the leadership as he is a favorite of Iran and its allies in the region.
Mashaal became known around the world in 1997 after Israeli agents injected him with poison in a failed assassination attempt on a street outside his office in the Jordanian capital, Amman.
Mashaal, 68, became Hamas’s 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.
Mashaal’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.
Mashaal has been a central figure at the top of Hamas since the late 1990s, though he has worked mainly from exile.
Who is Khaled Mashaal?
Born in Silwad near the West Bank city of Ramallah, Mashaal moved as a boy with his family to the Gulf Arab state of Kuwait.
At the age of 15, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, which became instrumental in the formation of Hamas in the late 1980s during the First Intifada.
Mashaal became a schoolteacher before turning to lobbying for Hamas from abroad for many years. He was in charge of international fund-raising in Jordan when he escaped assassination after being injected with poison in the street.
Jordan eventually closed Hamas’s bureau in Amman and expelled Mashaal from the Gulf state of Qatar. He moved to Syria in 2001.
Meshaal ran Hamas 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. Mashaal now lives in both Doha and Cairo.
His abrupt departure from Syria initially weakened his position within Hamas. Mashaal himself told Reuters that his move affected relations with Hamas’s main paymaster and weapons supplier – Iran.
In December 2012, Mashaal paid his first visit to the Gaza Strip and delivered the main speech at Hamas’s 25th anniversary rally.
Friction between Mashaal and the Gaza-based Hamas leadership surfaced over his attempts to promote reconciliation with President Mahmoud Abbas, who heads the Palestinian Authority.
Mashaal 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 terror group’s political office, also operating overseas.
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