We’ve just reported that Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh says three of his sons have been killed in an air strike. Here’s some background on Haniyeh, the man widely considered Hamas’s overall leader.

A prominent member of the movement in the late 1980s, Israel imprisoned Haniyeh for three years in 1989 as it cracked down on the first Palestinian uprising.

He was then exiled in 1992 to a no-man’s-land between Israel and Lebanon, along with a number of Hamas leaders.

After a year in exile, he returned to Gaza. In 1997 he was appointed head of the office of Hamas’s spiritual leader, strengthening his position.

Haniyeh was appointed Palestinian prime minister in 2006 by President Mahmoud Abbas after Hamas won the most seats in national elections, but was dismissed a year later after the group ousted Abbas’ Fatah party from the Gaza Strip in a week of deadly violence.

Haniyeh rejected his sacking as “unconstitutional”, stressing that his government “would not abandon its national responsibilities towards the Palestinian people”, and continued to rule in Gaza.

He was elected head of Hamas’s political bureau in 2017.

In 2018, the US Department of State designated Haniyeh a terrorist. He has lived in Qatar for the past several years.\

Read more about the group’s main leaders

BBC