Israel’s assassination of long-serving Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh has caused the resistance movement to reshuffle its cards, drawing on the institutionalised frameworks already in place and understanding the urgency of a smooth transition.

On Tuesday, Hamas named the movement’s chief in Gaza Yehia Al-Sinwar, as its new leader. Al-Sinwar, 61, is one of the main figures Israel vehemently seeks to target.

Al-Sinwar had been sentenced to four life sentences and spent 22 years in Israeli prison. He was one of more than 1,000 Palestinian detainees who were released in 2011 in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Observers believe that choosing Sinwar as the leader of the resistance movement is in itself a warning message to Israel.

In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, Hamas announced that it had begun consultations among its leadership and other bodies to elect a successor. It also issued statements reassuring supporters that its executive and Shura institutions were functioning normally and that the organisation could sustain the resistance under the most arduous circumstances.

“Since the first hours after the assassination, the movement’s Political Bureau and Shura Council have held a series of meetings and intensive discussions informed by a high sense of responsibility to elect a successor in accordance with established procedures and regulations,” Hamas said in a statement, adding that it would announce the results as soon as the process was complete.

Huge crowds of mourners assembled to bid farewell to Haniyeh in funeral ceremonies for him in Tehran and Doha. Elsewhere, millions joined in commemorative prayers amidst widespread calls to avenge his assassination.

Haniyeh was a towering figure in the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas). He was born on 23 January 1962 in the Shati Refugee Camp in Gaza, where his parents had fled from the ethnic cleansing and destruction of the Palestinian village of Jura during the Nakba in 1948.

After completing his primary and secondary education in schools operated by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), he obtained a diploma from the Al-Azhar Institute in Gaza and then a BA in Arabic literature from the Islamic University in Gaza in 1987.

He became a dean at this university in 1992. In 1997, he headed the office of Hamas’ founder and spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and then went on to rise in the ranks of the resistance organisation.

Haniyeh became politically active in university, taking part in the first Intifada (1987-1993) against the Israeli occupation. He was arrested for the first time in 1987, again a year later, and then a third time in 1989. The latter arrest led to his imprisonment for three years. Upon his release in 1992, he was exiled to Marj Al-Zuhur in Southern Lebanon; however, he was able to return to Gaza a year later after the signing of the Oslo Accords.

He had numerous scrapes with death. On 6 September 2003, he was wounded during an Israeli raid targeting Hamas leaders, including Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. On 14 October 2006, after he had been elected to head the Palestinian Government in Gaza, he was prevented from re-entering Gaza after a trip abroad and then, on 20 October, his convoy was targeted during an armed clash between Fatah and Hamas.

The Israeli occupation army has targeted Haniyeh’s home repeatedly during its wars against Gaza, demolishing it completely during its current frenzy of destruction, killing three sons and at least two grandchildren of the resistance group leader.

Haniyeh was elected head of the Palestinian Government in Gaza after Hamas won a decisive majority in the internationally monitored legislative elections in 2006. The results triggered a power struggle between Hamas and Fatah, the other main Palestinian faction, which culminated in Haniyeh’s dismissal by current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in June 2007 and a permanent geopolitical rift between the Fatah-led West Bank and the Hamas-led Gaza Strip.

In May 2017, he was elected head of the Hamas Political Bureau, a post he held until his assassination on 31 July.

“Everyone in Hamas is in a state of emergency, including those residing abroad. The movement is in disarray because the Israeli occupation has already assassinated several other Political Bureau members and is hunting down all first-tier Hamas leaders,” Palestinian political analyst Nidal Khadra told Al-Ahram Weekly.

“Haniyeh was a unifying figure and the political umbrella of the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation,” political analyst Hani Al-Dali, an expert on the Palestinian resistance, told the Weekly.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Netanyahu thought that by assassinating him he could claim a victory where the occupation forces on the ground have failed. He wants to bring Hamas to its knees and calculates that whoever succeeds Haniyeh will be more flexible,” he said.

“But Hamas is aware of Netanyahu’s guile and insidious aims. So, Haniyeh’s successor will undoubtedly be even firmer and more resolute, in order to show that Hamas will remain steadfast and never yield.”

While Hamas has a central leadership, it is not a centralised organisation, Al-Dali said. “The decentralisation is one of its strengths and enables it to withstand many military and political blows and the diplomatic blockade,” he said. Unlike some who expect tensions within Hamas over the succession, he expects the transition to proceed very smoothly.

“The assassination of Haniyeh is the most consequential carried out by Israel in decades,” political analyst Mohsen Abu Ramadan told the Weekly. “The aim was to create a political, military, and diplomatic coup that Netanyahu could exploit domestically and externally to compensate for his failures and reestablish Israel’s aura of deterrence.”

“Netanyahu has long been bent on killing all the leaders of the Palestinian cause. With this latest assassination, he aimed to break Hamas’ resolve and disrupt its political and organisational cohesion, which it brought with it to the negotiations during the current war.”

“What he did succeed in is obstructing the ceasefire talks, which confirms that the release of the Israeli hostages is very low on his scale of priorities.”

In Abu Ramadan’s opinion, the assassination simultaneously betrays Netanyahu’s desire to prolong the war in Gaza and to resist the domestic, regional, and international calls for a ceasefire.

“His popularity has soared among the Israeli public, which has been in a state of euphoria since the assassination. But he will pay the price as Israel’s state of emergency drags on for many more months, wreaking a severe toll on the Israeli economy,” he said.

Khadra said that the assassination marked a turning point in Israel’s 10-month old war of genocide against Gaza.

“Either this will lead to a major military escalation in the region or to a process of diplomatic containment, pushing Israel, unable to achieve a victory, to accept the truce proposal presented by US President Joe Biden, thereby forestalling the outbreak of a regional war,” he commented.

Many analysts believe that choosing Al-Sinwar will complicate — if not freeze — the ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas. Not only will this further delay the release of the hostages, but it will also add more fuel to the regional tinderbox, although some analysts believe that limited responses by Hamas or Tehran might contain the situation.

Ayman Al-Raqab, a political science professor at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, believes that Israel had a green light from Washington to carry out the recent assassinations in the heart of Beirut and Tehran, which occurred immediately after Netanyahu’s return from his trip to the US.

This suggests that Israel felt confident that the response to its acts would be limited. At the same time, according to Al-Raqab, the path to a ceasefire has been blocked and will not reopen until after the US presidential elections in November or after the new president takes office in January 2025, as Netanyahu intended.

In Khadra’s opinion, the assassination of Haniyeh also delivered a message to Iran that its support for Hamas has become too costly to sustain. Hamas might therefore be compelled to look for support elsewhere. Hamas would not be able to sustain a full-scale war for long without support from the outside, Khadra said.

At the same time, the assassination compounds the pressures on the Hamas leadership to be more flexible in the negotiations, because if it does not reach an agreement, the assassinations will continue. Khadra also believes that mounting pressures inside Israel and the US might force Netanyahu into a ceasefire agreement, especially since the 10-month assault in Gaza has outlived its purpose.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 8 August, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly