Amid the ongoing conflict in the region, Mashal spoke about Palestine and said, “Together, we will defeat Zionists and we will stand united for Gaza, which is fighting for Al Aqsa (mosque). Israel is taking revenge on our residents. Houses are being demolished. They have destroyed more than half of Gaza. They are destroying churches, temples, universities, and even UN institutions…”
BJP state president K Surendran criticised the rally, objecting to the participation of “Hamas extremists”.
Once termed “The Man Who Haunts Israel” by Time MagazineMashal is currently based in Qatar. Here is a brief look at his life.
Who is Khaled Mashal?
Marshal was born in the West Bank town of Silwad in 1956. His family had to flee their home after the 1967 War between Israel and Arab states, in which Israel won and captured the West Bank.
Mashal then became a member of what would become Hamas, a militant organisation that was willing to use violence for the cause of Palestine. He headed Hamas’s Politburo or its main decision-making body from 1996 to 2017.
In a 2017 interview with Al Jazeerahe said, “I am one of the founders of the organisation. I was there since day one. I was part of the founding and launch even before Hamas was officially declared in 1987… Therefore, I was a member of its consultative council and leadership structures since day one.” Currently, he heads the group’s ‘external’ politburo based in Qatar.
Mashal also lived in Kuwait between 1967 and 1990 and led a Palestinian Islamic movement at Kuwait University. After the start of the Gulf War in 1990, when Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait led to a Western alliance fighting a war against it, Marshal moved to Jordan. He has also lived in Syria and Iraq.
Opposition to Israel and evolving stance
Mashal echoed the opposition that Hamas leaders held towards Israel. For a long period, the organisation did not recognise Israel and claimed that territories which existed prior to the establishment of Israel in 1948 should be recognised as Palestine.
Hamas emerged in the early 1990s, differentiating itself from the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), a secular organisation which favoured a more conciliatory approach towards Israel. In a bid to strike at Israel, which had one of the most developed military organisations in the world, Hamas began to stage suicide bombings against Israeli civilian targets in 1994.
However, in a document in 2017, Hamas said it accepted the idea of a Palestinian state within the territories that Israel occupied in the Six-day War of 1967. This was seen as a softening of their stance. “Hamas advocates the liberation of all of Palestine but is ready to support the state on 1967 borders without recognising Israel or ceding any rights,” Mashal had said.
That document also said that “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.”
Zionism refers to the 19th-century movement for the creation of a Jewish ancestral homeland and the development and protection of the present-day state of Israel.
In the 2017 interview, Mashal elaborated on the possibility of negotiating with Israel: “For us, the principle of negotiations or not is not something set in stone. It is a matter of politics and it is dynamic… Currently, Israel is not interested in peace… When we are strong enough to create a reality that will force Israel to reconsider its positions against us, only then negotiations will have value and meaning for us. Look at, for example, the PLO’s negotiations experience with Israel. It got them nowhere after decades of futile talks with Israel,” he said.
This month, following Hamas’s attack on Israel and the large-scale counter-attacks launched by Israel since then, Mashal has repeated the ideas of unity against Israel. “[We must] head to the squares and streets of the Arab and Islamic world on Friday,” Meshaal said in a recorded statement sent to Reuters earlier this month. “Tribes of Jordan, sons of Jordan, brothers and sisters of Jordan… This is a moment of truth and the borders are close to you, you all know your responsibility,” he said.
Israeli assassination attempt
It was while living in the Jordanian capital of Amman that Mashal was the target of an Israeli assassination attempt in September 1997, ordered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who was then serving his first term.
According to an account in Time Magazinetwo agents of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad waited outside his office. As Mashal approached, one sprayed the painkiller fentanyl into his ear.
“The Israelis had hoped that their lethal dose of modified fentanyl — up to one hundred times more potent than morphine — would send Mashaal into a nap from which he would never awake, and that the agents would slip away, leaving no evidence of foul play,” it said.
As he was rushed to the hospital, Jordanian King Hussein threatened to cut off relations with Israel “by midnight.” Dennis Ross — then US President Bill Clinton’s chief Middle East negotiator — received an early morning call from Netanyahu, who explained the crisis and urgently wanted to speak with Clinton. Ross was stunned by Israel’s recklessness.
According to his memoir, Ross asked Netanyahu, “What were you thinking?” and that he was dumbfounded at the Israelis’ plan. “Didn’t it occur to you that something could go wrong?” he asked the PM, who said “No”.
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Clinton was involved in mediating the Jordan-Israel stand-off, given how the two countries had normalised relations just three years prior to the incident. Netanyahu had to provide an antidote formula to Jordanian doctors for Mashal’s recovery. “He also apologized in person to the brother of the King, who refused to see him,” Time‘s report states.
According to negotiators cited in a 1997 New York Times article, Jordan eventually agreed to discuss the release of eight Mossad agents who came from Israel to carry out the attack, and Israel was eventually forced to in turn release Sheik Ahmed Yassin, “the founder and spiritual leader of the Hamas movement.”
Netanyahu, under American pressure, was forced to release other Hamas prisoners because the Jordanian King was “threatening a total breach of relations, the closure of the Israeli Embassy and a public trial by military court of the two Israeli agents, according to participants in the negotiations.”
