GAZA (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.
Hamas sources said Meshaal is expected to be chosen as the paramount leader of the group to replace Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassination in Iran in the early hours of Wednesday, with Tehran and Hamas vowing retribution against Israel.
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 favorite of Iran and its allies in the region.
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.
