1936 - 2004
Founder of HAMAS.
Ahmad Ismaʿil Yasin was born in 1936 in the village of al-Jurah, south of Gaza. His family moved to the Gaza Strip after the 1948 Arab - Israel War. He had an accident in his youth (while playing sports) that resulted in his paralysis. He studied Arabic language and religion, became a teacher in both fields, and rose in prominence as a militant preacher in the mosques of Gaza. He headed the Islamic-oriented al-Mujamma al-Islami. In 1983 Yasin was arrested and charged with possession of weapons, then was released in 1985 during a famous prisoner exchange between Israel and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command.
Yasin was the key founder and leader of HAMAS (acronym for the Arabic name of the Islamic Resistance Movement), which was officially begun in 1987. HAMAS's ideology is a militant and more violent version of the Muslim Brotherhood, and it analyzes the Arab - Israeli conflict in purely religious terms. Palestine is seen as a religious waqf land that belongs to Muslims, and enmity is expressed toward Jews. The movement calls for armed struggle, but unlike the secular Palestinian organizations of the 1960s and 1970s, it considers this struggle to be obligatory jihad. HAMAS played a key role in the Palestinian Intifada of 1987, and Yasin was arrested in 1989 and sentenced to life in prison. He was released in 1997, when Israel had a deal with Jordan's King Hussein after a failed assassination attempt in Jordan against the head of the Political Bureau of HAMAS, Khalid Mishʿal. Despite Yasin's feeble physical state, he provided a strong leadership for the movement. He had a weak voice and a variety of ailments (some resulting from torture and mis-treatment in Israeli jails), but he could inspire the masses. Although he left military decisions to the military branch of HAMAS, he legitimized the suicide attacks that characterized the second (al-Aqsa) Intifada of 2000. Yasin succeeded in turning HAMAS into the second most important Palestinian organization after Yasir Arafat's al-Fatah movement. His militancy did not prevent him from reaching pragmatic agreements with Palestinian organizations, including Marxist groups, and he had a large following in the Persian Gulf region, where he raised much of the money for HAMAS before U.S. pressures led Gulf governments to curtail fundraising for the movement. In 2003 Yasin survived an Israeli bomb attack on a house he was thought to inhabit. Yasin was assassinated outside a Gaza mosque on 22 March 2004 by a missile fired from an Israeli helicopter.
— AS'AD ABUKHALIL
