Sheikh Ahmed Yassin

“The Israeli enemy leaves the Palestinian people only one choice: resistance, struggle, and martyrdom” — the sentence the Palestinian record preserves as Ahmed Yassin’s own summary of his politics. He was born in June 1936 in the village of al-Jura near al-Majdal, lost his father at five, and was driven with his family into the Gaza Strip in the Nakba of 1948, where they lived the refugee poverty of the camps; he left school for a year to work in a broad-bean restaurant to support the household. In the summer of 1952, at sixteen, he broke vertebrae in his neck while playing on the seashore, leaving him paralysed in all four limbs for the rest of his life. He finished secondary school in 1958, taught Arabic and Islamic education in UNRWA schools, preached in the mosques of Gaza, and in 1965 was jailed for a month by the Egyptian authorities on the charge of belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood.

After Israel occupied Gaza in June 1967 he preached resistance from the pulpit of the Abbas Mosque in Shati refugee camp and organized help for the families of prisoners and the dead. Chosen in 1968 to lead the Muslim Brotherhood in the Strip, he founded the Islamic Center (al-Mujamma’ al-Islami) in 1973 and helped found the Islamic University of Gaza in 1978. In April 1984 the Israeli authorities sentenced him to thirteen years for forming an armed group and possessing weapons; he was released in the May 1985 exchange between Israel and the PFLP–General Command. On 9 December 1987, as the First Intifada erupted, Yassin and a group of Islamic activists meeting at his house created the Movement of Islamic Resistance — Hamas — of which he was regarded ever after as the spiritual father.

The record runs in both directions and must be written whole. In May 1989 Israel arrested him and sentenced him to life plus fifteen years on nine indictments that included incitement to kill or kidnap Israeli soldiers and founding the movement’s military and security wings; contemporary reporting adds that the 1989 arrest concerned his ordering the killing of Palestinians suspected of collaboration. From 1994 onward Israelis buried their dead from Hamas suicide bombings that Israeli and American officials said were inspired and sanctioned by Yassin’s authority; the US State Department placed Hamas on its list of foreign terrorist organizations, and on the day of his death the Israeli army spokeswoman Ruth Yaron said, “Ahmed Yassin was the chief of a terror organization, who was aiming at Israeli civilians.” Within the Palestinian arena his relations with the Palestinian Authority were tense; Yasser Arafat twice placed him under house arrest after Hamas attacks. An attempt by the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades to force his release through the kidnapping of the border policeman Nissim Toledano in December 1992 ended with Toledano found dead near Jerusalem.

Yassin was freed in October 1997, exchanged for the two Mossad agents captured in Amman after the failed poisoning of Khaled Mishal. After the second intifada began in September 2000 Israel moved to systematically assassinate the Hamas leadership: a first strike missed him on 6 September 2003, and at dawn on 22 March 2004, as the wheelchair-bound sheikh left a mosque in Gaza’s Sabra quarter after the dawn prayer, an Israeli Apache helicopter fired three missiles that killed him and seven companions and wounded two of his sons. Tens of thousands poured into the streets; the funeral prayer at the Omari Mosque overflowed into the city. The Palestinian prime minister Ahmed Qureia called the killing “a cowardly, criminal act against a prominent Palestinian leader who devoted all his life to the favor of the independence of his people,” and Arafat declared three days of official mourning.

Sources

• Ahmad Ismail Yasin — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question
• Sheikh Yassin: Reviled as Terrorist, Admired as Hero — Voice of America, 22 March 2004