Last week, Iranian leadership arranged a ceremonial farewell for Hamas Political Bureau head Ismail Haniyeh. Despite all the pomp, Iran couldn’t draw attention away from the scandalous assassination of Haniyeh on Iranian soil, smearing the reputation of a country that has bragged the efficiency of its secret service and Revolutionary Guard at foiling attacks. And soon after the event ended, the battle among leading Hamas members around who would succeed Haniyeh began.
Haniyeh was in Iran at the time of the assassination because he had been invited to the inauguration of Iran’s newly elected president. He wasn’t the only Hamas leader invited. Khaled Mashal, the former head of Hamas, also received an invitation but declined to attend. He even asked Haniyeh not to fly to Tehran. When Haniyeh insisted, Mashal pleaded that he stay in touch with him regularly. Lots of questions emerged after the assassination, focusing on what made Mashal so skeptical about visiting Tehran. Was he tipped off that something terrible awaits Hamas leaders in Tehran? Only Mashal has the answer.
In Gaza, the rumor was that Haniyeh received a phone call from someone close to him. His cell phone was with Wasim, his bodyguard, sitting in the next room. Wasim dashed into Haniyeh’s room and handed him the phone. Within seconds, a strong blast killed the two men. Whether or not the story is true, it reveals the strong conviction held by Hamas and by the public in Gaza, and probably elsewhere, too, that an insider must have been involved in locating and killing Haniyeh.
The reports that the Iranians questioned at least 30 senior officers from the intelligence services, Revolutionary Guard, and military gave oxygen to the conspiracy theory. Reports published abroad and quoted by the Israeli press spoke of Mossad’s success in penetrating the highest level of Iran’s intelligence community. Now, Iran must come out with the truth and nothing but the truth to clear its name and prove its intelligence community was impenetrable.
The cell phone scenario sounded easy to believe because it was almost a repeat of what happened with Hamas’ senior bombmaker Yahya Ayyash, codenamed “the engineer.” While in Gaza on January 5, 1996, Ayyash answered a call from his father on a cell phone. The phone detonated, killing him. The spy tapping the phone identified the speaker as Ayyash and immediately activated the bomb implanted in the phone.
Haniyeh strived to place himself somewhere between two major camps that vied to control Hamas. Turkey, with its firm attachment to the Muslim Brotherhood, never stopped its efforts to control Hamas and snatch it away from Iranian hegemony. Mashal was Turkey’s man in Hamas. The Turkish relied on him more than they could depend on anyone else in Hamas, and he didn’t let them down. As head of Hamas’ political bureau in 2011, Mashal turned against Syria’s Bashar Assad and joined the Islamist insurgents who started a civil war that lacerated the country and claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.
Since then, Mashal has been regarded by the Iranians as a persona non grata. That status made him even more set on becoming secretary general of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, the supreme authority in the Muslim Brotherhood. That body has long been at odds with Shiite Islamists in Iran. Mashal adopted realistic views that other Hamas leaders rarely expressed. For instance, he admitted that his movement erred in thinking it could rule the Gaza Strip alone. He was referring to the military coup the movement launched against the Palestinian Authority in June 2007, in which no less than 700 Fatah fighters and members of the Gazan Preventive Security were killed by armed Hamas men.
When the word spread that Hamas chose Mashal to fill Haniyeh’s shoes, every analyst thought the Sunni camp had won the battle against Iran. Hours later, it was announced that Mashal wasn’t the replacement but a member of Hamas’ Shura Council, an advisory council of 51 members representing Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Israeli jails where they are incarcerated, and in exile. The Shura members are the ones who elect the 16 members of the political bureau, who then vote for one of them to be the leader.
This process didn’t apply after Haniyeh’s assassination. Hamas’ regulations stipulate that one of two deputies to the political bureau head can replace him should he be incapacitated. Haniyeh’s first deputy, Saleh al-Arouri, was assassinated in Beirut by Israel early in January this year. Mashal, head of Hamas abroad, and Yahya Sinwar, head of the political bureau in Gaza, were the remaining options for taking over. The decision to crown Sinwar was meant to give weight and power to the militant leadership of Hamas as opposed to the somewhat liberal leaders residing in Qatar.
No wonder some believe the leaders in Doha preferred Sinwar so they would keep themselves away from the bullets of Israeli assassins. They believed Sinwar, hiding in a network of tunnels underneath Gaza, was safer than they were when it came to Israeli assassination plans. Their apparently generous behavior toward Sinwar was actually an attempt to save their own skin.
An open question around Sinwar
How efficiently Sinwar will run Hamas is still an open question. The man is unreachable. It is not easy to speak to him by phone. Every time a deal to exchange the Israeli captives in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel comes up, the Hamas negotiators in Doha or Cairo need at least 24 hours to scramble a phone line to speak with Sinwar and get his go-ahead.
Now, Sinwar will have to make all those decisions on his own while keeping his head as low as possible to avoid assassination by any Israeli death squad or special ops unit. True, he doesn’t have the legitimacy of an elected leader, but still, he has the generic legitimacy of someone holding the fate of the Israeli captives in his hands.
Many Palestinians believe that Sinwar was Benjamin Netanyahu’s golden egg whom he needed to ensure that the Gaza Strip would never be reunited with the West Bank. Now that Sinwar is the leader legally empowered to make decisions, his days are numbered only because his assassination is likely to provide Netanyahu with the victory photo he needs in any upcoming Israeli election. Killing Sinwar might be Netanyahu’s means to end the war in Gaza and move troops to the north, as his chief military officers have repeatedly proposed. With Sinwar in power, Netanyahu will have fewer reasons to stop the Gaza war. This is a conclusion I heard all over the place. In the Palestinian public perception, the fact that Sinwar is still alive is credited to Netanyahu’s intention to perpetuate the war in Gaza. For this reason, he needs someone as manipulative and stubborn as he is. The Sinwar-Netanyahu duo seem to complement each other.
Elias Zananiri is a veteran Palestinian journalist and political analyst.