Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas strongly condemned on Wednesday the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, state news agency WAFA reported.
Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader, was the tough-talking face of the Palestinian group's international diplomacy as war raged back in Gaza, where three of his sons were killed in an Israeli airstrike.
Appointed to the top job in 2017, Haniyeh moved between Turkey and Qatar, escaping the travel curbs of the blockaded Gaza Strip and enabling him to act as a negotiator in ceasefire talks.
SONS KILLED IN AIRSTRIKE
Three of Haniyeh's sons - Hazem, Amir and Mohammad - were killed on April 10 when an Israeli air strike struck the car they were driving, Hamas said.
Haniyeh also lost four of his grandchildren, three girls and a boy, in the attack, Hamas said.
While telling Israel's military they would find themselves "drowning in the sands of Gaza", he and his predecessor as Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, had shuttled around the region for talks over a ceasefire deal with Israel that would include exchanging hostages for Palestinians in Israeli jails as well as more aid for Gaza.
"Haniyeh is leading the political battle for Hamas with Arab governments," Adeeb Ziadeh, a specialist in Palestinian affairs at Qatar University, said before his death. "He is the political and diplomatic front of Hamas," Ziadeh said.
Haniyeh and Meshaal had met officials in Egypt, which has also had a mediation role in the ceasefire talks. Haniyeh travelled in early November to Tehran to meet Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iranian state media reported.
As a young man, Haniyeh was a student activist at the Islamic University in Gaza City. He joined Hamas when it was created in the First Palestinian intifada (uprising) in 1987.
He was arrested and briefly deported. Haniyeh became a protégé of Hamas' founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, who like Haniyeh's family, was a refugee from the village of Al Jura near Ashkelon.
By 2003 he was a trusted Yassin aide, photographed in Yassin's Gaza home holding a phone to the almost completely paralysed Hamas founder's ear so that he could take part in a conversation.
Yassin was assassinated by Israel in 2004. Haniyeh was an early advocate of Hamas entering politics.
In 1994, he said that forming a political party "would enable Hamas to deal with emerging developments".
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