Khaled Meshaal

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 student association.

Following the outbreak of a Palestinian uprising known as the First Intifadah in 1987, the organization publicly proclaimed its existence under the name Hamas. 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 Hamas at odds with the PLO, which was by then advancing toward recognition of Israel’s right to exist.

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.

Hamas 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.

In 1997 Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, authorized the assassination of Meshaal in retribution for Hamas’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 regime, saved Meshaal by successfully pressuring Netanyahu to provide the antidote.