Rising toll among Hamas leaders
THE assassination highlighted the deadly risk of a leadership role in Hamas — arguably the most dangerous job in the world. The most prominent figures in the organisation in recent years have included:
Dead: Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Founder, spiritual leader and figurehead. Quadriplegic, nearly blind and confined to a wheelchair. Established Hamas in February 1988 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist alternative to Yassir Arafat’s secular Fatah movement. Killed by Israel on March 22 this year.
Dead: Ismail Abu Shanab. A relative pragmatist within the political leadership. Not a familiar figure at public rallies. Assassinated last August.
Dead: Ibrahim Makadmeh. A senior Hamas strategist, killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza in March last year. Released in October 1997 as part of a deal by Israel to secure the freedom of two Mossad agents who had bungled an assassination attempt on Khaled Mashaal, the head of the group’s political office.
Alive: Dr Mahmoud Zahar. Sheikh Yassin’s personal physician and a relative hardliner within what remains of the senior political hierarchy. Perhaps the most high-profile remaining Hamas leader. He survived one assassination attempt last summer, but his son was killed.
Alive: Ismail Haniya. A relative moderate among the next generation of the Hamas hierarchy. Well known in Gaza. Hamas’s go-between with the Palestinian Authority.
Dead: Salah Shehada. Head of Hamas’s military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. Killed by a one-tonne bomb in July 2002 that killed up to 17 other Palestinians in Gaza.
Dead: Yehiyeh Ayyash, a master bomb-maker known as “The Engineer”, was killed by a booby-trapped mobile phone in Gaza in 1996.
Alive: Mohammed Deif. Believed to be Shehada’s replacement at the head of Izz al-Din. Israel’s most-wanted man and in permanent hiding.
Alive: Khaled Mashaal. Head of Hamas’s overseas political bureau, based in Damascus. A physics teacher born in the West Bank. Survived a bungled Mossad assassination attempt in 1997 when Israeli agents were captured in Jordan after trying to inject him with poison darts. The late King Hussein demanded the antidote and the release of Sheikh Yassin from prison in return for sending them back to Israel. He was expelled from Jordan in 1999 and moved to Syria.
Alive: Moussa Abu Marzook. Mashaal’s deputy. A US-educated engineer. Expelled to Jordan and then Syria. Will only be targeted by Israel if Ariel Sharon decides to launch assassinations in Syria.