LOS ANGELES.–Billionaire Hamas leader-in-exile 62-year-old Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in his home in Tehran, attending the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Hanieh was considered one of the primary architects of the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre thet raped, killed and tortured 1,2000 Israeli civilians, taking 250 hostages. Many of the Israelis killed were teenagers and young adults at the Nova Music festival in the Negev Desert. Since the min-Holocaust Oct. 7, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared war on Hamas, a Iranian-funded terror group committed to destroying the Israeli state. Founded by blind and wheelchair-bound Sheikh Ahmed Nassin in 1987 to serve as the military wing of Yasser Arafat’s 1964 Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO], Hamas was chartered with only one mission: To destroy the Israeli state. Hamas has fought three wars with Israel since seizing Gaza in 2007.
Arafat was courted by the United Nations to make peace with Israel after the disastrous 1967 Six Day War, where Israel defeated the PLO and six Arab states, including the vaunted Egyptian military led by Gen. Gamal Abdul Nasser. Defeated and humiliated, Arafat continued to push for various U.N. resolutions as a peace formula for ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. U.N. Resoluion 242 in 1967, specifically offered peace to Israel in exchange for a return to the pre-1967 borders. After the Six Day War, Israel annexed Egypt’s Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula, Jordan’s West Bank and East Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights. At no time in the history of the Holy Land did Arabs living in the region ever have sovereignty over the territory. Ottoman Empire ruled the Holy Land for over 500 years until the empire was broken up Aug. 20, 2020 at the Treaty of Sevres.
Arafat, in 1964, was the first one to coin the term Palestinians to refer to Arabs living in the Holy Land. Since then, Palestinians claimed sovereign rights despite the fact the territory was called the British Mandate of Palestine at the Treaty of Sevres, handing over Ottoman sovereignty to the British. British ruled the Holy Land until 1948 when they deeded it to the Jews in the wake of the WW II Nazi Holocaust, killing some 6 million Jews. After Jewish sovereignty, Israel rapidly became the most technologically advanced democracy in the Middle East, transforming a desolate desert into a thriving technological and agricultural state. When Israel surrendered Egypt’s Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority in 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon realized it because a liability for Israeli rule. Two years later, Hamas seized the Gaza Strip in a bloodless coup in 2007.
Since controlling the Gaza Strip, 20 years of Hamas rule on saw the plundering of Gaza resources, turning leaders like Ismail Haniyeh, Khaled Meshaal and Abu Marzouk into billionaires, after years of stealing Gaza’s donor cash. Instead of building infrastructure and developing the Gaza Strip, Hamas looted the territory and built military tunnels for its eventual war with Israel. Hamas and its rulers have only hit Gaza with a wrecking ball all with the phony intent of destroying the Jewish State. Hamas knows it can never destroy Israel but they derive inspiration from the Nazi Holocaust, hoping that something similar can happen in Israel. Working with Iran, Hamas continued its bloodthirsty practice, launching several uprisings and suicide bombing against Israel, all to no avail. Now Haniyeh falls from an Israeli missile after waging war against Israeli for years.
All the tal
k now is about the Gaza War morphing into a wider conflict with Lebanon-based, Iran-funded Hezbollah giving Hamas the only hope. Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah knows what happens when he wages war with Israel. He ends up destroying Lebanon, the once Paris of the Middle East but now under Arab rule an impoverished, broken down shell of its former self. Lebanon’s beleaguered government wants no part of a new war with Israel but has little control of the Hezbollah terrorist group. Haniyeh’s death is another in a long line of political assassinations that’s killed much of Hamas leadership over the last 40 years. That doesn’t stop in current leader Yahya Sinwar from exercising his duty in Gaza’s military tunnels to of destroying the Jewish State. Sinwar, the mastermind of the Oct. 7 massacre, knows he’s the next in line.
Haniyeh was the latest casualty in the anti-Semitic war against the Jewish State, something Netanayahu knows all too well. Netanyahu told a joint session of Congress July 24 that “Never Again” would Jews submit to a Nazi-like Holocaust from Hamas or anyone else. Haniyeh personifies the egregious corruption of terrorists willing to exploit the Palestinian cause to enrich himself. How ironic that the billionaire Haniyeh was killed in his own home in Tehran, sucking up to the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that keeps his fake Islamic Revolution going by whipping up anti-Semitism in the Arab world. Haniyeh’s assassination proves that Netanyahu means business when it comes to eliminating a Nazi-like threat to the Jewish State. While Haniyeh is not alone in looting the Gaza Strip to enrich himself, he paid the price for his self-serving, jet-setting lifestyle.
About the Author
John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.
