Khaled Meshaal

Khaled Meshaal (born May 28, 1956, Silwad, West Bank) exiled Palestinian politician who served as the head of the political bureau of the Palestinian Islamist movement Ḥamās from 1996 until 2017.

Early life

Meshaal was born in the town of Silwad in the West Bank, then under Jordanian administration, and spent the first 11 years of his life there before fleeing with his family after Israel captured the West Bank in 1967. They settled in Kuwait, where Meshaal’s father had resided and worked as an agricultural labourer and preacher since the late 1950s. Devoutly religious, Meshaal was drawn to Islamic political activism and joined the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Kuwait at age 15. Meshaal enrolled at Kuwait University in 1974, studying physics and participating in Palestinian activism. Meshaal and his Islamist colleagues clashed with the secular nationalist factions that dominated the university’s Palestinian Student Union, and they eventually broke away to form their own student association.

After graduating, Meshaal remained in Kuwait, where he taught physics and remained active in the Palestinian Islamist movement. In 1984 he stopped teaching in order to devote more time to his political work, which consisted of organizing and fund-raising to build a network of Islamic social services within the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and to develop Palestinian Islamists’ military capabilities, which at the time lagged far behind those of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) guerrilla organizations, such as Fatah. Following the outbreak of a Palestinian uprising known as the first intifadah in 1987, the organization publicly proclaimed its existence under the name Ḥamās. The group’s charter, issued in 1988, called for a holy war to establish an Islamic state covering the entirety of historic Palestine. This hard-line stance placed Ḥamās at odds with the PLO, which was by then advancing toward recognition of Israel’s right to exist.

Ḥamās leadership

Meshaal moved from Kuwait to Jordan following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. In 1992 the group proclaimed the existence of a political bureau in exile, and Meshaal was named as a member. Operating outside Israel’s reach, the bureau was responsible for the movement’s international relations and fund-raising activities. Meshaal was elected head of the bureau in 1996.

Ḥamās emerged in the early 1990s as the main opponent of the PLO’s efforts to make peace with Israel, which were embodied in the Oslo Accords, a series of agreements between Israel and the PLO which provided for limited Palestinian self-governance in some areas of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Ḥamās began to stage suicide bombings against Israeli civilian targets in 1994.

In 1997 Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, authorized the assassination of Meshaal in retribution for Ḥamās’s suicide bombings. Undercover Israeli agents approached Meshaal on the street in Amman, Jordan, and surreptitiously sprayed him with a slow-acting poison. The plan, intended to be covert, went awry when one of Meshaal’s bodyguards noticed the attack and detained two of the agents before they could escape. King Hussein of Jordan, believing an assassination by Israel in Jordan would undermine a recently signed peace treaty between the two countries and destabilize his own regime, saved Meshaal by successfully pressuring Netanyahu to provide the antidote.

In 1999 Jordan cracked down on Ḥamās, briefly imprisoning Meshaal before expelling the political bureau from the country. After briefly settling in Qatar, Meshaal established a new permanent headquarters in Damascus in 2001.

Meshaal became the movement’s leader and central figure in 2004, following the assassination of Ḥamās founder and spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and the assassination of Yassin’s successor, Abd al-Aziz al-Rantissi, less than a month later. As the main international representative of Ḥamās, Meshaal defended the group’s use of violence and its refusal to recognize Israel but also indicated that it would be open to a long-term truce with Israel if that country withdrew to its pre-1967 borders.

The events of the Arab Spring brought a number of changes for Ḥamās and for Meshaal. Months after Egyptian Pres. Hosni Mubarak was ousted, Egypt opened its border crossing with the Gaza Strip from 2011 to 2013. This allowed Meshaal to visit the Gaza Strip in 2012 for the first time, which Ḥamās had been ruling since 2007. Meanwhile, the Ḥamās political bureau’s decadelong residence in Damascus came to an end when what began as a crackdown by Syrian security forces against anti-government protesters in 2011 evolved into a full-scale civil war. (See Syrian Civil War.) Meshaal relocated the bureau to Qatar and spoke out in support of the Syrian opposition.

In mid-2017, at the end of his most recent term as head of the political bureau, Meshaal stepped down and was replaced by Ismail Haniyeh, who had been leading the Ḥamās government in the Gaza Strip for about a decade. This marked a transfer in the balance of power within Ḥamās from those living abroad, such as Meshaal, to those living in the Gaza Strip.