FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
JERUSALEM – The Shati refugee camp, “beach” in Arabic, is so called because the gray concrete houses, the sloping floors added as the family expanded overlook the coast, and the open sewers drip from the rocks into the sea . What should be the main access road is an increasingly muddy alley that leads to the building where Ismail Haniyeh lived. The bars block the way there, even though the Hamas leader has been living in Qatar for several years. He took over from Khaled Meshal and, like him, tried to control the sometimes contradictory dynamics between leaders inside Gaza – under the bombing – and outside in Doha, under the stucco ceilings of the Qatari capital.
The fisherman father was born on the beach 61 years ago. After the fighting of the first Intifada and in prison, he became assistant to the wheelchair-bound Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was killed by the Israelis in March 2004. His successor Abdel Aziz Rantissi remained in office for a month, a rocket hit his car. At this point the heads of the organization form a secret triumvirate, it is better to remain hidden, the three should be on equal terms, in reality Haniyeh leads them and it is he who is the first name on the list about which the Islamists decide Yasser Arafat had died two years earlier in order to run in the 2006 parliamentary elections. They are clearly winning: Haniyeh is head of government in Gaza, while the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah is headed by President Abu Mazen.
Abu Mazen is unable to get him to recognize the agreements reached with Israel, be it the peace accords in Oslo or the recognition of the Jewish state. So the majority of the international community boycotts him, the shelf he has prepared in his office to collect photos with the world’s greats remains empty, he receives a congratulatory call from Bobo Craxi, the then Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, who was in charge of the The rest goes wrong for the Italian executive headed by Romano Prodi.
The president disowned him in 2007 because the paramilitaries had used weapons to seize control of the 363 square kilometers between Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean. The extremist militiamen enter the pink palace of Raís, a residential area of Rimal, wear his slippers, sit on the silk bedsheets, turn over the photos of his wife, look at the wall, because she is a woman and they are all male .
To the 2.3 million Palestinians who crowded into his home, Ismail was always a son of Shati – he has 13 children – humble and devoted, ready to share with them the “salt and za’atar” as he did to the Israelis during who shouted for almost two days during the months of war between July and August 2014: “They will be enough for us to survive, you will never get us down.” The more sarcastic comment is that he can season lamb with the marjoram variety Origanum Syriacum at a comfortable distance from Qatar. When he replaced Meshal, who had been at the helm for 21 years, in 2017, analysts were convinced that with him the organization could become more pragmatic and more interested in governing the Gaza Strip than in dislodging Israel from the Middle East. The same illusions are forming around Yahia Sinwar, who was elected to Haniyeh’s position as ruler of the Gaza Strip. Assumptions were dashed by the massacre at dawn last Saturday.
In these days of war, Israeli officials have declared that the entire Hamas leadership is “destined for death,” bnei mavet is the phrase in Hebrew. Avigdor Liberman, who was about to become defense minister under Benjamin Netanyahu, had warned: “Forty-eight hours after receiving the order, I will give the order to kill Haniyeh.” It was 2016. Three years later – now a former ally of Netanyahu and one of his harshest critics – he announced that he had submitted to the Security Council “detailed plans to eliminate him, and Bibi was more than once obliged to refuse”. When Liberman resigned, it was Haniyeh who called him out on a Interview from Gaza provoked: “I won.”