The senior Hamas official, Saleh al-Arouri, who was killed in an Israeli attack on Lebanon on Tuesday, January 2, played an important role in increasing the military capacity of this Palestinian group and strengthening relations with regional allies. has played.

Al-Arouri, 57, was one of the founders of Izz al-Din al-Qassam, the military wing of Hamas, in the early 1990s.

A Hamas source told AFP that al-Arouri recently played the role of “connection” between the Hamas movement, Iran and Hezbollah, and made frequent trips to Iran.

The source added that al-Arouri was considered the leader of Hamas in the West Bank of the Jordan River, and his knowledge and expertise in recent years helped build and increase the military capacity of this Islamic movement.

Al-Arouri, who was considered the second-in-command of Hamas before his death, was accused of being involved in a number of attacks, including the surprise attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7.

According to official Israeli information given to AFP news agency, 1140 people, most of whom were civilians, were killed in the attack on October 7.

According to the information, in that attack, about 250 Hamas fighters, some of whom have been exchanged, took hostages and took them to the Gaza Strip, which is under the control of the Hamas group. According to the information of the Gaza Ministry of Health, at least 22,313 people have been killed in Israeli air and ground attacks on Gaza since the October 7th attack.

Life in exile

Saleh al-Aroori was born in the village of ‘Aroori, near Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank of the Jordan River. He studied Islamic law based on Quranic teachings at the University of Hebran .

Al-Aroori joined the Muslim Brotherhood at a young age and became actively involved in student Islamic activities. He became a member of this group in 1987 when the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood founded the Hamas movement.

Al-Arouri was arrested several times in the early 1990s and sentenced to 15 years in prison in 1992 for establishing the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigade (Hamas’ military wing) in the West Bank.

He was released from prison in 2007, but three months later he was imprisoned again and in 2010 he was released from prison in Israel and exiled to Syria.

Al-Aroori moved to Lebanon after living in Syria for three years. After his release from prison in 2010, he was appointed as a member of the military political office of Hamas, and in 2011, with the help of Egyptian mediators, in the case of the exchange of French-Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit with Palestinian prisoners. Hamas was a member of the negotiating team.

In 2017, al-Aruri was appointed by Hamas as the deputy head of the group’s political department. He was married and lived in Beirut with his wife and two daughters.

The remaining Hamas officials

With the death of al-Arouri, the Israeli forces will turn their attention to other senior officials of the Hamas group. Among these officials is Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the Hamas group.

Haniyeh is a person who prefers action rather than opinion. He lives in exile in Turkey and Qatar and has long wanted to strike a compromise between military resistance against Israel and the political stance of the Hamas group. This is while the United States of America and the European Union consider the Hamas movement to be a terrorist group.

Another target of the Israeli forces is Yahya Sinwar, the leader of the Hamas group in Gaza. He served in various positions of the Hamas group and is one of the staunch preachers of the military struggle against Israel. Hamas considers him the group’s “defense minister”.

Sanwar, who can also speak Hebrew, is a mysterious and secretive figure who has a lot of information about Israel and has spent 23 years in an Israeli prison. He was released from prison in 2011 in an exchange of Palestinian prisoners with Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

At the start of Israel’s ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Israeli officials described Sinwar as “a walking corpse.”

Another possible target for Israel may be the head of the military branch of the Hamas group, Mohammed Zaif, who has been on the list of international terrorists by the United States since 2015, and Israel has tried to kill him at least six times.

Zaif, considered by Hamas to be the group’s “Chief of Staff,” is the man who called Hamas’ attack on Israel an “al-Aqsa storm” in an audio message. His whereabouts and whereabouts are unknown and it is said that he has the ability to hide among people and change his identity.

Despite constant pressure to end its military invasion of Gaza, Israel has repeatedly insisted that it will continue the invasion until the complete destruction of Hamas.