Khaled Mashal

He had participated in the 1936–1939 Arab revolt with the Palestinian guerilla leader Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni.

The trip deepened his feelings for his homeland and his sense of the losses in 1948 and 1967.

Khaled Mashal (خالد مشعل, ; born 28 May 1956) is a Palestinian political leader who is the former head of the militant organization Hamas.

Mashal was born in 1956 in Silwad in the Jordanian-ruled West Bank.

He attended Silwad Elementary School until fifth grade.

His father, Abd al-Qadir Mashal, was a farmer (fellah) and had moved to Kuwait in 1957 to work in agriculture and as an imam.

The Six-Day War in 1967 forced Mashal's family to flee the West Bank and he has since then lived in other parts of the Arab world in exile.

For that reason, he was considered part of Hamas' "external leadership".

Following the 1967 Six-Day War, during which Israel occupied the West Bank, his family fled to Jordan and, after a month or two, they joined Abd al-Qadir in Kuwait, where Mashal completed high school.

He entered the prestigious Abdullah al-Salim Secondary School in the early 1970s and joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1971.

Mashal enrolled in Kuwait University in 1974, and soon became involved in student politics.

As a 19-year-old, Mashal visited historical Palestine in 1975 for two months for the first time since the occupation began in 1967.

He was able to travel extensively in both Israel and the occupied territories.

He headed the Islamic Justice list (qa'imat al-haq al-islamiyya) in the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) elections in 1977.

The list was based on the Palestinian Islamic movement, a part of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The GUPS elections were cancelled and he founded the Islamic League for Palestinian Students (al-rabita al-islamiyya li tolaab filastin).

He graduated with a bachelor of science degree in physics in 1978.

In 1983, the Palestinian Islamic movement convened an internal, closed conference in an Arab state, which included delegates from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Palestinian refugees from Arab states.

The conference laid the foundation stone for the creation of Hamas.

Mashal was part of the project's leadership.

After graduating, Mashal became a teacher and taught physics in Kuwait until 1984.

After 1984, he devoted himself to the project on a full-time basis.

After the founding of Hamas in 1987, Mashal became the leader of the Kuwaiti branch of the organization.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, he and the rest of Hamas' leadership in Kuwait relocated to Jordan.

In 1992, he became a founding member of Hamas' politburo and its chairman.

Mashal was a founding member of Hamas' politburo, and was elected chairman in 1996, following the imprisonment of his predecessor Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook in 1995.

On 25 September 1997, Mossad agents acting under orders from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his security cabinet attempted to assassinate him.

The agents entered Jordan on fake Canadian passports and disguised as tourists.

Two of them waited at the entrance of the Hamas offices in Jordan's capital Amman, and, as Mashal walked into his office, one of them came up from behind and held a device to Mashal's left ear that transmitted a fast-acting poison.

Mashal's bodyguards were suspicious prior to the attack and were able to chase the agents down and capture them.

Other agents were also found and captured.

In an interview, he described the attack as "a loud noise in my ear ... like a boom, like an electric shock."

Initially, he thought the agents had failed to hurt him but later in the day he developed a severe headache and began vomiting.

He was rushed to a Jordanian hospital where his condition rapidly deteriorated.

Immediately after the incident, Jordan's King Hussein demanded that Netanyahu turn over the antidote for the poison, threatening to sever diplomatic relations and to try the detained Mossad agents.

King Hussein feared that the death of a Hamas leader would trigger riots in his kingdom, perhaps even a civil war.

Netanyahu refused, and the incident quickly grew in political significance.

He became the recognized head of Hamas after Israel assassinated both Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and his successor Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi in the spring of 2004.

Under his leadership, Hamas stunned the world by winning a majority of the seats in the Palestinian legislative election in 2006.

Mashal stepped down as Hamas' politburo chairman at the end of his term limit in 2017.