CAIRO: 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 Amman, the Jordanian capital.

The hit against a senior figure of the Palestinian 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.

Meshaal, 68, became Hamas’s political leader in exile the year before Israel tried to eliminate him, a position that enabled him to represent the Palestinian group at meetings with governments around the world, unhindered by tight Israeli travel restrictions that affected other Hamas officials.

Hamas sources said Meshaal is expected to be chosen as the paramount leader of the group to replace Ismail Haniyeh. Khalil Al Hayya, a Hamas official who is based in Qatar and has headed negotiators in indirect Gaza truce talks with Israel, has also been a possibility for the leadership as he is a favourite of Iran and its allies in the region.

Meshaal’s relations with Iran have been strained due to his past support for the revolt against Syrian President Bashar Al Assad in 2011.

Israel has assassinated or tried to kill several Hamas leaders and operatives since the group was founded in 1987 during Intifada, 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 air strike, 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’s 1988 charter calls for Israel’s destruction — or keep fighting.

Softens stance on Israel

Meshaal rejects the idea of a permanent peace deal with Israel, but has said that Hamas could accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem as a temporary solution in return for a long-term ceasefire.

The October 7 raid in Israel made the group’s priorities clear.

Khalid Meshaal said the raid returned the Palestinian cause to the centre of the world agenda.

He urged Arabs and other Muslims to join the battle against Israel and said Palestinians alone would decide who runs Gaza after the current conflict ends, in defiance of Israel and the United States who want to exclude Hamas from governance.

Joined Brotherhood at 15

Meshaal has lived most of his life outside the Palestinian territories. Born in Silwad, near the West Bank city of Ramallah, Meshaal moved as a boy with his family to Kuwait.

At the age of 15, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, the Middle East’s oldest Islamist group. The Brotherhood became instrumental in the formation of Hamas in the late 1980s.

Meshaal became a schoolteacher before turning to lobbying for Hamas from abroad for many years while other leaders of the group have languished for long periods in Israeli jails.

He was in charge of international fund-raising in Jordan in 1997 when he barely escaped assassination.

Netanyahu played an accidental but important role in establishing Meshaal’s credentials when he ordered Mossad agents to kill him in retaliation for a market bombing in occupied Jerusalem that killed 16 people and was blamed on Hamas.

The suspected assassins were caught by Jordanian police after Meshaal was injected with poison in the street. Netanyahu, then in his first term as premier, was forced to hand over the antidote for the poison and the incident turned Meshaal into a hero of the Palestinian resistance.

Jordan eventually closed Hamas’s bureau in Amman and expelled Khaled Meshaal to Qatar. He moved to Syria in 2001.

Meshaal ran Hamas from exile in Damascus in 2004 until Jan 2012 when he left the Syrian capital because of President Assad’s fierce crackdown on groups suspected of role in the uprising against him. Meshaal now divides his time between Qatar and Egypt.

His abrupt departure from Syria initially weakened his position within Hamas, as ties with Damascus and Tehran, which were vital for the group, gave him power. With those links damaged or broken, rivals based within Gaza, the birthplace of Hamas, began to assert their authority.

Meshaal himself said his move affected relations with Iran, Hamas’s most ardent supporter.

In December 2012, Meshaal paid his first visit to the Gaza Strip and delivered the main speech at Hamas’s 25th anniversary rally. He had not visited the Palestinian territories since leaving the West Bank at age 11.

Published in Dawn, August 1st, 2024