Sun 01 August 2021:
Hamas Officials have announced that Ismail Haniya has been re-elected as the leader of the Palestinian group, strengthening his dominance over the organization that governs the embattled Gaza Strip, Reuters reported.
Haniya, Hamas chief since 2017, has controlled the group’s political activities in Gaza, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the diaspora largely from outside Gaza, splitting his time between Turkey and Qatar for the past two years. He has not said whether he will return.
In May, he directed Hamas in an 11-day confrontation with Israel that resulted in the deaths of over 250 Gazans and 13 Israelis.
An Egyptian-mediated ceasefire has mostly held since.
“Brother Ismail Haniya was re-elected as the head of the movement’s political office for a second time,” a Palestinian official told Reuters news agency on Sunday following an internal election by party members. He won unopposed. His term will last four years.
Haniya, who is 58 years old, was Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s right-hand man in Gaza until the armed group’s wheelchair-bound leader was assassinated in 2004 by an Israeli air strike.
Haniya led Hamas into politics in 2006, when they were surprising winners in Palestinian parliamentary elections, defeating President Mahmoud Abbas’s divided Fatah party.
Hamas is an Islamic movement that has faced four major Israeli military assaults since taking control of Gaza in 2007, most recently in May, and numerous smaller battles over the years.
The repeated fighting, combined with an Egyptian-Israeli blockade, has decimated Gaza’s economy, with unemployment hovering around 50 percent.
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