AFP/Gaza


Hamas re-elected its veteran leader Khalid Mishal in Cairo yesterday, an official of the Palestinian Islamist movement said.
“The leaders of Hamas chose Mishal,” the high-ranking official told AFP via telephone from the Egyptian capital, requesting anonymity.
Hamas officials said earlier in the day that the party’s governing shura council was poised to re-elect him for a four-year term.
Following speculation he would be forced aside by the movement’s powerful leaders in the Gaza Strip, which Hamas has controlled since 2007, Mishal himself said last year he would not seek a new term.
But the Islamist movement preferred to stick to a leader who in the words of an official “has given the movement a national face... and has good relations in the Arab world”.
Aged 56, imposing but affable, the former physics teacher with salt-and-pepper hair and large dark eyes was born in Silwad, near the West Bank town of Ramallah.
It is there he spent his childhood before going into exile with his family to Kuwait, following the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 when the Jewish state seized the West Bank.
As a student at Kuwait University, Mishal became involved in religious activism and in 1987 was a founding member of Hamas, which stemmed from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood movement.
In 1990, he left Kuwait for Jordan, which borders the West Bank, and six years later became head of the Hamas political bureau.
On September 25, 1997, agents of Israel’s Mossad secret service disguised as Canadian tourists bungled an attempt to assassinate him on a street in Amman by injecting him with poison.
Three of the attackers took refuge at the Israeli embassy, but two were captured by Jordanian authorities.
Mishal fell into a coma and a furious King Hussein demanded Israel hand over the antidote if it wanted the captured agents to be freed.
The episode compelled then Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—re-elected in 2009 and again in 2013 - to release Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and 19 others from prison.
Following a falling out with Jordan, the Hamas political bureau was forced to leave Amman for Damascus in 1999.
That was Mishal’s base when in 2004 he was propelled to the movement’s leadership after Israel assassinated first Yassin and then his successor Abdelaziz al-Rantissi in the Gaza Strip.
A brilliant orator, Mishal uses the freedom of movement that is denied to Hamas leaders in Gaza to crisscross the Arab and Muslim world.
Long considered a radical, Mishal has gradually shifted position to an implicit acceptance of the notion of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
In May, he said he was willing to “give a chance” to negotiations with Israel, a notion long rejected by Hamas whose stated aim is the destruction of the Jewish state.