Ahmed Yassin

Ahmed Ismail Hassan Yassin (1936 – 22 March 2004) was a Palestinian preacher and politician, the founder of Hamas and its spiritual leader from its creation in 1987 until his assassination. He was born in the village of al-Jura near Ashkelon, fled with his family to Gaza in the 1948 war, and was quadriplegic from a sporting accident at sixteen, reliant on a wheelchair and nearly blind. He worked as an Arabic teacher and preacher in Gaza's mosques, helped set up a Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and founded the Mujama al-Islamiya in 1973. ^{1 2}

The sources disagree about his birth date: the Arabic article gives 28 June 1936; the English article reads "June 1936/37" in its lead and reports that his Palestinian passport said 1 January 1929 while he himself claimed to have been born in the summer of 1936. The date is therefore unresolved in the sources themselves. ^{1 2}

Yassin was born in al-Jura, a small village near Ashkelon. His father Abdullah died when he was three, after which he was known in his neighbourhood as Ahmad Sa'ada, after his mother Sa'ada al-Habeel. He and his entire family fled to Gaza in 1948, settling in al-Shati camp. ¹

On 15 July 1952, at sixteen, he sustained a severe spinal injury wrestling his friend Abdullah al-Khatib; his neck was kept in plaster for 45 days and the damage rendered him quadriplegic for the rest of his life. He applied to and attended Ain Shams University in Cairo but could not pursue his studies because of his deteriorating health and economic problems, and was educated at home, reading widely in philosophy, religion, politics, sociology and economics; in this period he began delivering weekly sermons after Friday prayers, drawing large crowds. ¹

After years of unemployment he became an Arabic teacher at an elementary school in Rimal, Gaza, where his popularity grew, and in 1960 he married a relative, Halima Yassin; they had eleven children. ¹

Yassin was actively involved in setting up a Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1973 he established the Islamic charity Mujama al-Islamiya in Gaza, which Israel recognised in 1979. In 1984 he and others were jailed for secretly stockpiling weapons, but he was released in 1985 as part of the Jibril Agreement. In 1987, during the First Intifada, he co-founded Hamas with Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, at first calling it the "paramilitary wing" of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, and became its spiritual leader. ^{1 3}

In 1989 Israel arrested Yassin and sentenced him to life imprisonment for ordering the killing of alleged Palestinian collaborators. In 1997 he was released as part of an arrangement with Jordan following the Mossad's failed attempt to assassinate Khaled Mashal in Amman, in exchange for two Mossad agents held by Jordan; he resumed the leadership of Hamas and was intermittently placed under house arrest by the Palestinian Authority. ^{1 2}

He survived an air strike on a Gaza building on 6 September 2003. On 22 March 2004 an Israeli helicopter gunship fired missiles at him as he was being wheeled from Fajr prayer in Gaza City, killing him, two assistants and seven passers-by; his funeral procession was attended by some 200,000 people in Gaza and the attack was internationally condemned. ^{1 4}

This section sets out positions as reported in the sources; it is not a verdict by the museum. The Israeli government held him responsible for the killing of Israeli civilians, and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon characterised him as the "mastermind of Palestinian terror"; Hamas is designated a terrorist organisation by, among others, the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan and Australia. His supporters regarded him as a spiritual leader and resistance figure, and the Muslim Brotherhood's Egyptian leader Mohammed Akef described him as a "martyr" and his assassination as a "cowardly operation". ¹

The article records his stated view, in a 1990s interview and a 1997 speech, that he did not fight Jews because they were Jews but because they had taken his land and home and made him a refugee; that in 1997 he proposed halting attacks if Israel withdrew from the West Bank and Gaza; and that he acknowledged Hamas targeted Israeli civilians in direct retaliation for the killing of Palestinian civilians. ¹

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