Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi

Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi was born in 1947 in the village of Yibna, between al-Majdal and Jaffa, and was six months old when Zionist forces occupied it in 1948 and his family fled to the Khan Yunis refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. He grew up there with nine brothers and two sisters, studied in UNRWA schools while working to help support the family, and won an UNRWA scholarship to the medical faculty of Alexandria University, graduating as a doctor in 1971 and taking a master’s degree in pediatrics in 1976. Back in Gaza he became head of pediatrics at Nasir Hospital in Khan Yunis, and would roam the city on foot to treat the sick children of the poor without charge. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood, which he had encountered as a student in Egypt, sat on the board of the Islamic Center, and lectured at the Islamic University of Gaza from its opening in 1978.

The Israeli authorities dismissed him from Nasir Hospital in 1983 and arrested him the same year for organizing a campaign to withhold taxes from the occupation. On 9 December 1987 he was one of the seven Muslim Brotherhood leaders who met at the house of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and decided to create the Movement of Islamic Resistance, Hamas. He was arrested in February 1988 and held until September 1990, then placed in administrative detention for a year from December 1990. In December 1992 Israel expelled him with 414 other Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists to Marj al-Zuhur in south Lebanon, where the deportees chose him as their spokesman; he returned in December 1993 under a US–Israeli–Palestinian compromise and was immediately placed in administrative detention again. He opposed the Oslo Accord and called for resisting the occupation by all available means, for which an Israeli military tribunal sentenced him to prison in August 1995. The Palestinian Authority arrested him in turn — in April 1998, when he was the movement’s official spokesman, and three times between 2000 and 2001.

The external record is part of his record. President George W. Bush named Rantisi among six Hamas leaders designated “international terrorists,” freezing their US assets and forbidding any dealings with them. Israel tried to kill him three times: on 10 June 2003, when a strike on his car killed a bodyguard and severely wounded his son; in September 2003; and again three days after Yassin’s assassination in March 2004. Hamas elected him Yassin’s successor in Gaza on the sheikh’s death on 22 March 2004. Twenty-six days later, on 17 April 2004, an Israeli helicopter fired three missiles at his car in the Gaza Strip, killing him and two bodyguards. Tens of thousands attended the funeral that set out from Shifa Hospital on 18 April; he was buried in the Sheikh Ridwan cemetery. A writer, poet and orator as well as a physician, he published political writing and poems in the Arab press throughout his life.

Sources

• Abd al-Aziz Rantisi — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question