Khaled Meshaal has been tipped as one of several possible candidates to become Hamas’s new political leader after Wednesday’s assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, head of the movement’s political bureau, The Telegraph reported Thursday.
Meshaal became known around the world in 1997 after Israeli agents injected him with poison in a botched assassination attempt on a street outside his office in the Jordanian capital Amman.
The hit, ordered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, so enraged Jordan’s then-King Hussein bin Talal, 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.
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 group at meetings with foreign governments around the world, unhindered by tight Israeli travel restrictions that affected other Hamas officials.
Meshaal’s relations with Iran have been strained due to his past support for the revolt in 2011 against Syrian president Bashar Assad.
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 favorite of Iran and its allies in the region.
Meshaal was born in Silwad near the West Bank city of Ramallah. He moved as a boy with his family to the Gulf Arab state of Kuwait. At the age of 15 he joined the Muslim Brotherhood.
Meshaal became a schoolteacher before turning to lobbying for Hamas from abroad for many years and he was in charge of international fund-raising in Jordan when he barely escaped assassination.
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.
According to the report, if Meshaal is chosen as the new Hamas leader, he will face great challenges in guiding Hamas during the next phase of the conflict with Israel, especially after the recent attack that led to a significant escalation of tensions between both sides.
Currently, all eyes remain on Hamas to determine its new leader amid complex political and security challenges at the Palestinian level and the broader international scale.
