The Haniyeh murder is a sign of Israel's weakness, not its strength

The assassination of Ismail Haniyeh is not Israel's first treacherous, savage assassination, and it does not seem it will be the last. With the outcome of each of these killings, Israel hoped, coveted and stooped to obtain results different from the previous ones, but so far it has not been able to obtain any different result from the murders it has carried out in this way. Each time it has been seized by the delusion that it could break the resistance by killing the leaders of an honorable people who resist its unjust, arrogant, contemptuous and spoiled occupation. In place of each leader it killed, a far better one, and far more of them, came.

The martyrs, as it were, water the soil of the struggle and make the leaders a fertile field for the homeland of resistance. It thinks it will destroy by killing, and does not know that in killing, a seed is planted in the ground. Those seeds sprout, and each turns into a thousand leaders.

Israel has resorted to and stooped to this path many times before. This is the easiest superstition it has let itself be carried away by. Let us not go too far back. On 5 January 1996 it murdered Yahya Ayyash, nicknamed "the Engineer," in Gaza. In 1997 it made a treacherous assassination attempt, by its agents, in Amman, the capital of Jordan, on Khaled Meshaal, one of the founders of Hamas and the political leader before Haniyeh. Meshaal was poisoned by Mossad agents who injected him with a poisoned syringe as he walked in the street. That he survived this assassination was possible thanks to the resolute stance of King Hussein of Jordan, who called the bluff of Netanyahu, who was then Israel's prime minister as well, and obtained the antidote.

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, one of the founders and spiritual leaders of Hamas, was like a nightmare for Israel. Against this old sage, who was confined to a wheelchair, on 22 March 2004 it carried out a savage assassination with a missile fired from a helicopter as he left the mosque he had gone to for the morning prayer. It thought that by killing him it could break Hamas's back and end the resistance as well. But it did not happen so; those who came afterward turned out to be far more resolute, far smarter and more organized. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, who took his place, it also martyred, in less than a month, on 17 April 2004, in a missile attack on his vehicle together with his two bodyguards.

Was Hamas finished? If it had been, would Israel have arrived at these days disgraced like this? On 21 October of the same year, Adnan al-Ghoul, with his wife and 7 children, in the bombing of a refugee camp in an Israeli air strike; on 1 January 2009, Nizar Rayan; on 15 January 2009, again in an air strike, the Gaza Interior Minister Said Siyam; and most recently, on 2 January 2024, in the Dahiyeh suburb of Beirut, in an attack carried out with an Israeli drone, Saleh al-Arouri, of the upper leadership of Hamas's political wing and at the same time one of the founders of the Qassam Brigades, joined the caravan of martyrs through Israel's cowardly and treacherous attacks.

After every martyr, new faces with leadership capacity grew within Hamas and shone. Within Hamas, hundreds, thousands of people with a leader profile, named or nameless, each like a star, have emerged. I look at the Hamas representatives who appear in the media from time to time; each is a person more reasonable, more consistent, and with stronger oratory and leadership abilities than the other.

To think that it will destroy the movement by killing its leaders is Israel's greatest weakness, its misreading of the situation. But a state of consciousness that would correct this misreading is very far from a Zionist obsession such as Israel. The Zionist ideology that gives rise to this obsessive state of mind produces delusions like these: the delusion that it can end the idea of Hamas by killing its leaders. The delusion of destroying while still small an enemy who will become a scourge when grown, by killing children. Yet did they not read their own prophet, Moses, too? Do they not know that the Pharaohs could not escape, by killing children, the inevitable end that was to come by the hand of Moses? Do they not know that God is preparing, in a place they never expected, a child, children, to take the revenge of all the oppressed from those tyrants?

Israel is in a panic, at a loss as to what to do. Its calculations are wrong again. Again too mathematical, but far from being correct. With the terrorist act it committed against Ismail Haniyeh, it shows not its strength and skill, but only its treachery, its helplessness, its cowardice, its criminality, its lawless villainy, and, most important of all, its brainlessness. The legendary intelligence power that it is trying to save today with this terrorist act has been made a laughingstock and exhausted every day, every hour in Gaza for 10 months. Its impenetrable iron dome has turned into a sieve, and its invincible war power it boasted of so much has become the plaything of children. The only thing it can do to save this situation is to kill children and civilians treacherously and basely. By carrying out such an act in Iran, its chief enemy, it is perhaps putting on a show of muscle, in its own view. Yet the body it is trying to show with the techniques and intelligence capability it used in this assassination has, for 10 months, by the hands of women and children in Gaza, become the laughingstock of the world.

As for Ismail Haniyeh, who all his life regarded martyrdom as the greatest rank, death was in any case for him like passing from one room to another. For the brave men of Gaza, for Muslims, life and death are intertwined and this world is only the field of the Hereafter. 4 months ago, on the first day of Eid al-Fitr, the Zionist murderers had assassinated, in a car in which 3 of his sons and 4 of his grandchildren were, and martyred them all. Haniyeh's reaction when he received the news of their martyrdom while visiting the wounded of Gaza in the hospital, by God, was like a scene that had come out of epics, out of legends, no, better still, out of the Age of Happiness: he says, "We are all from God and to Him we shall return. Praise be to God," and there was also his continuing the visit to the patients as if nothing had happened, saying "let us get on with our work" to the voice on the phone that was giving the news in tears. How many of his relatives had been martyred before, and afterward 10 more of his family were martyred, among them his sister, his nephews and nieces, and 6 grandchildren.

The Zionist regime seemed to have pledged to wipe out his lineage. But he did not take this move as something special to himself, although he was Ismail, and although his enemies harbored an incorrigible hatred, one that will not be mended, for his name.

Nor was he the only Ismail in Gaza to lose so many of his kin. He knew this, and not only knew it but lived it: by saying "the blood of my relatives is not more precious than the blood of the people of Gaza," he showed an ideal model of being a leader, as if descended from heaven. He did not hang back by telling the people he led, if they were dying, that death was martyrdom for them and driving them to death; he too knew how to die, he brought out the martyrdom within death and held fast to it.

As Taha Abdurrahman said: he was already like a martyr while living, and now he continues to live as a martyr. This is a jihad: either victory or martyrdom.

May God accept Haniyeh among the martyrs in his station. We witnessed his monotheism, his dignity, his struggle and his martyrdom. May God make him a witness to what we have lived through.