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Khaled Mashal

Some expected that Khaled Mashaal will head the movement during this critical period after the martyrdom of Yahya Sinwar , in a battle with Israeli occupation soldiers in Tel al-Sultan 17 October 2024. Khaled Meshaal continued to lead Hamas until 2017, when he stepped down as head of the Political Bureau , but he is still considered one of the influential voices within the movement. Meshaal is a supporter of the principle of armed resistance, but he also does not rule out the use of diplomatic tools to achieve Palestinian goals. During his leadership, Meshaal worked to achieve a balance between military and political work, as Hamas under his leadership showed flexibility in dealing with international and regional issues.

Mashaal is considered one of the figures who expresses the movement's vision and orientations on many vital issues, including the position on Israel, regional relations, and the political path of the resistance. Khaled Meshaal is also a figure of great international importance. His political positions are clearly evident during the television interviews and press conferences he participates in, where he always emphasizes the right of the Palestinian people to resist and regain their land.

Mashaal has political and diplomatic experience, but his relations with Iran, Syria and Hezbollah soured over his support for Arab protests in 2011. When he was in Lebanon in 2021, Hezbollah leaders reportedly refused to meet with him. But Mashaal has good relations with Turkey and Qatar and is considered a more moderate figure who headed the group until 2017. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas called him to offer his condolences for the killing of Haniyeh. Yahya Sinwar, the powerful Hamas figure leading the war in Gaza, is at the opposite end of that spectrum and is unlikely to support Mashaal’s leadership. The group's Shura council, the main consultative body, was expected to meet soon after Haniyeh's funeral in Qatar 31 July 2024, to name a successor, who turned out to be Sinwar rather than Mashaal.

Khaled Mashal is an exiled Palestinian politician, who had long lived in exile. He had run Hamas since 1996, surviving an assassination attempt in 1997. After the killing of Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi in April 2004, Israel's minister for parliamentary relations, Gideon Ezra, warned that Khaled Mashal will meet a fate identical to that of al-Rantisi. Khaled Mashal, a physics teacher who directed Hamas's political bureau from Damascus and later Qatar, was what he called the group's "first head," its world leader. After the killing of Rantisi, he was considered to be the highest-ranking member of Hamas.

He was HAMAS Political Bureau chief from April 1996. On 01 April 2013 Khaled Meshaal was re-elected as the political leader of Hamas for another four years. The secret direct vote by members of the group's Shura Council took place at a Cairo hotel. He held this post until May 2017, and served as Political Bureau External Region chief since early 2021. Mishal is considered a senior leader of Hamas and initially resided in Damascus, Syria, where he had lived in exile since the early 1990s.

Khaled Mashal was a leader of the Palestinian political-military organization Hamas, which had been battling Israel for many years (especially in the area of Gaza Strip). Numerous suicide bombings conducted by the Hamas fundamentalists had led to the order of killing the Palestinian politician given by the authorities of Israel.

Born in Silwad, West Bank near Ramallah on 28 May 1956, he was educated until secondary level in Silwad, and displaced with his family in 1967 to Kuwait. Mishal studied physics at Kuwait University, where he led the Islamic Palestinian student movement, graduating with a BA in Physics. He became a leader of the Palestinian Islamic bloc at Kuwait University and co-founder of the Al-Haq Islamic faction, which competed with Fateh for the GUPS leadership. He worked as a physics teacher in Kuwait until the 1990 Gulf Crises; then moved to Jordan; became member of the Hamas politburo since its establishment and served as elected head of Hamas in Jordan since 1996.

He survived an assassination attempt with a time delayed nerve gas by Israeli Mossad agents in Amman, Jordan on 25 September 1997. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was reported to have personally ordered the assassination effort. Two men carrying forged Canadian passports and believed to be agents of Mossad, the Israeli secret service, tried and failed to poison Mashal. The attack was carried out by spraying a toxic substance into the victims’ ear. One of the first symptoms experienced by the victim was tinnitus and a sensation of an electrical current going through his body. After approximately 2 hours he started feeling nauseous, short of breath and started vomiting soon after. He was admitted to a hospital where, due to acute respiratory failure, he needed a mechanical ventilation.

Two of the agents were chased and captured by Jordanian authorities, while the HAMAS official was taken to a hospital and, although seriously ill, recovered. Jordan’s King Hussein demanded that then Israeli PM Netanyahu turn over the poison antidote, which he did after pressure from the US. Meshal’s condition improved only after administering the antidote (naloxone) provided by the Israeli authorities.

King Hussein then brokered a deal that saw the ailing Muslim religious leader who founded HAMAS, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who was serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison, released from prison and eventually returned to Gaza. Several other HAMAS activists were also released from Israeli jails, presumably in return for the two Israeli agents being held in Jordanian police custody.The event caused an uproar in Israel, the Middle East generally, and beyond. Canada recalled its ambassador from Israel over the used of forged Canadian passports.

Mashal was arrested by Jordanian authorities in Amman on 30 August 1999 and expelled from Jordan to Qatar for harming the Kingdom’s stability in Nov. that year; he then relocated to Damascus.

Khaled Mashal, one of the highest leaders in the Hamas organization, was at a World Assembly of Muslim Youth [WAMY] conference in October 2002. The Hamas actually prepared a record of Khaled Mashal's meetings in Riyadh, and it was found by Israeli forces the following month in the Gaza Strip. And according to that record, Khaled Mashal was not just a peripheral guest of a peripheral organization, WAMY. He actually had a for-eyes meeting with Crown Prince Abdullah, who actually chaired that WAMY conference.

Mashal was one of six senior Hamas leaders named by US Pres. Bush in Aug. 2003 as Specially Designated Global Terrorists, freezing any assets in the US and prohibiting transactions with US nationals; was involved in the PA-Hamas ceasefire talks and the inter-Palestinian dialogue for national unity between different factions.

Following the election victory of Hamas, in the January 2006 Palestinian parlimentary elections, Mashal declared that Hamas will not disarm. Many Western countries had asked Hamas to disarm and have threatened to cut off aid to Palestine if they do not lay down their weapons. Mashal has even suggested that Hamas could create a Palestinian army to defend Palestine against aggression. But he also announced that Hamas will be working with Fatah to form a partnership in order to govern the Palestinians.

Khaled Mashal was Hamas’ politburo chief from 2004-2017. His term began after the Israeli assassinations of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and Abdel Aziz Al-Rantisi in 2004 and ended in a peaceful transition to Ismail Haniyah. Mashal saw the organisation through multiple attempts at a roadmap to peace and a major Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip. Mashal has shown a willingness to negotiate with Israel to return to the 1967 borders and grant Palestinians a right of return, while importantly implying the necessary existence of the State of Israel, despite Hamas’s historic denial of that possibility. Mashal has been one of the most direct and candid leaders in dialogue and confrontation with Israel and this has garnered international recognition. In 2021, Hamas elected Mashal for a four-year term as head of its office in the diaspora.

Although Hamas's power base is in Gaza, which it has controlled since 2007, it also has many followers among refugees and others in the Middle East and elsewhere. In 2012 Meshaal angered close Hamas ally Syria when he left Damascus because of Iranian-backed President Bashar al-Assad's war against rebels who were Sunni Muslims, like Hamas.

Meshaal was elected to be head of the Palestinian Islamist group's office in the diaspora, a spokesman said. Meshaal, 64, who survived an Israeli assassination attempt in 1997, was head of the political bureau until 2017 when he was replaced by Ismail Haniyeh, 59, who is based in Gaza. Khaled Mashal spoke at an online event by the youth branch of Morocco's Justice and Development party 30 August 2020. He said the Israeli annexation plan and the so-called Deal of the Century are agreements that no Palestinian would accept. Mashal said Israel followed a new policy by taking advantage of regional and international changes in recent years and efforts to normalize relations with Israel have not benefited anyone but the Tel Aviv administration.

Meshaal said 08 October 2024 the Palestinian group would rise "like a phoenix" from the ashes despite heavy losses during a year of war with Israel, and that it continues to recruit fighters and manufacture weapons. "Palestinian history is made of cycles," Meshaal, 68, a senior Hamas figure under overall leader Yahya Sinwar, told Reuters in an interview. "We go through phases where we lose martyrs (victims) and we lose part of our military capabilities, but then the Palestinian spirit rises again, like the phoenix, thanks to God." He said Israel had not spelled out a plan for Gaza when the war ends, and this could allow Hamas to re-establish itself although perhaps not with such strength or in the same form. His comments appear intended as a signal that the group will fight on whatever its losses, Middle East analysts said.