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, 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.
Meshaal, 68, became Hamas' 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.
Hamas sources said Meshaal is expected to be chosen as
paramount leader of the group to replace Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated
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 favourite of Iran and its
allies in the region.
Meshaal'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.
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.
Meshaal rejects the idea of a permanent peace deal with
Israel but has said that Hamas, which in the 1990s and 2000s sent suicide
bombers into Israel, 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 07, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas-led militants
from Gaza, which killed 1,200 people and led to the kidnapping of over 250
people, according to Israeli tallies, made the militant group's priorities
clear.
Israel retaliated with airstrikes and an invasion of
Gaza that have killed over 39,000 Palestinians, pursuing a campaign to
eradicate Hamas that has reduced much of the densely populated coastal enclave
to rubble.
Meshaal said the October 07 Hamas attack returned the
Palestinian cause to the center of the world agenda.
He urged Arabs and Muslims to join the battle against Israel
and said Palestinians alone would decide who runs Gaza after the current war
ends, in defiance of Israel and the United States who want to exclude Hamas
from post-war governance.
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 the Gulf Arab state of Kuwait, a hotbed of pro-Palestinian
sentiment.
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 during the first Palestinian uprising
against Israeli occupation.
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
when he barely escaped assassination.
Netanyahu played an accidental but important role in
establishing Meshaal's militant credentials when he ordered Mossad agents to
kill him in 1997 in retaliation for a Jerusalem market bombing 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' bureau in Amman and expelled
Meshaal to the Gulf state of Qatar. He moved to Syria in 2001.
Meshaal ran Hamas, a Sunni Muslim movement, 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. Meshaal now divides his time between Doha and Cairo.
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 told Reuters that his move affected
relations with Hamas' main paymaster and weapons supplier Iran - a country
Israel believes poses by far the greatest threat to it because of its ambitious
nuclear program.
In December 2012, Meshaal paid his first visit to the Gaza
Strip and delivered the main speech at Hamas' 25th anniversary rally. He had
not visited the Palestinian territories since leaving the West Bank at age 11.
While he was abroad, Hamas asserted itself over its secular
rival, the Western-backed Palestinian Authority (PA), which has been open to
negotiating peace with Israel, by seizing control of Gaza from the PA in a
brief 2007 civil war.
Friction between Meshaal and the Gaza-based Hamas leadership
surfaced over his attempts to promote reconciliation with President Mahmoud
Abbas, who heads the Palestinian Authority.
Meshaal 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 group's political office, also operating overseas.
In 2021, Meshaal was elected to head the Hamas office in the
Palestinian diaspora.
