Premiership Offered to Hamas Leader

Ismail Haniya, who led the radical Islamic group Hamas to a stunning victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections, was tapped Tuesday to assemble a new government and serve as its prime minister.

During a two-hour meeting, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas formally offered the leadership job to Haniya, a former university administrator who grew up in a refugee camp, was briefly exiled, and was jailed several times by Israel.

Haniya said after the session with Abbas that he would review the offer with other Hamas leaders and reply soon. But a positive response is considered a foregone conclusion, and the hiatus between the offer and a response is largely a formality.

Haniya, 43, would face daunting challenges, both in trying to set up a functional coalition government with archrival Fatah and smaller parties, and leading the Palestinian Authority’s dealings with a skeptical international community and the Jewish state Hamas has vowed to eliminate.

Haniya told reporters that it was “too early to talk” about the fate of Hamas’ armed wing, and whether it would be incorporated into Palestinian security forces.

Haniya also refused to discuss whether a future government would heed Abbas’ call Tuesday to continue Fatah’s peace agenda.

In a televised interview, acting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, “We will fight against Hamas with the strength that is necessary.... We will build a wall against Hamas, and we know how to do it.”

Haniya’s government would begin in poverty. Already desperately short of cash, the Palestinian Authority faces threatened cuts in aid from the United States and Europe unless a Hamas-led government agrees to recognize Israel, renounce violence and honor past agreements with Israel.

Israel says it will withhold millions of dollars in taxes and customs duties from the Palestinian Authority, and will try to dissuade other nations from funding the Hamas-led government.

“No doubt it is not an easy mission,” said Khalail abu Laila, a pharmacist and Hamas leader who has known Haniya for 20 years.

Haniya assumes his new duties with a public following that reaches beyond Hamas’ traditional base in the refugee camps, such as the one at the edge of Gaza City where he was born and still lives. But he is a political neophyte, and though widely described by analysts as a pragmatist, he has not been specific about his agenda as prime minister.

One of Hamas’ top spokesmen in recent years, Haniya headed the slate in Jan. 25 elections that gave the Islamic group 74 of 132 legislative seats.

He joined Hamas at its formation in 1987, amid the first Palestinian uprising against Israel, and a decade later became the top aide to the party’s founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin. The group became a rival to the Fatah faction led by Yasser Arafat, and for years criticized and clashed with the ruling Palestinian movement.

Haniya was among more than 400 Hamas leaders whom Israel deported to southern Lebanon in 1992, including a Who’s Who of the group’s future political leadership. A photo collage of the deportees shows a stern-faced Haniya, his thick beard not yet gray. Also pictured are Mahmoud Zahar, who will head Hamas’ legislative faction, and Aziz Dweik, the new parliament speaker.

As a member of the inner circle, Haniya was groomed for leadership by Abdulaziz Rantisi, a fiery hard-liner and another founding member of Hamas. After Yassin and Rantisi were killed in separate Israeli airstrikes in 2004 during a campaign targeting the Hamas leadership, Haniya increasingly came to be the public face and voice of Hamas.

He also burnished a reputation for managing delicate dealings with rival Palestinian factions. In 1996, he helped mediate with Arafat’s security forces after they carried out a bloody crackdown on Hamas.

By most accounts, Haniya’s relations with other groups, including Fatah, remain good, though they will be tested by negotiations for a new Palestinian government. Only one small independent party had agreed to join the government by Tuesday, but Haniya and other Hamas leaders will continue to talk with representatives of other parties to persuade them to join a new governing coalition.

Fatah leaders have said they prefer to let Hamas govern -- and risk failure -- on its own.

“This next step is very important,” said Jamal Khoudary, an independent from Gaza City who was elected to the parliament with Hamas’ endorsement. “The picture will be completed when we see what kind of government is going to be formed.”

Haniya’s reputation as a relative moderate stems in part from a personal manner that many describe as understated, even tranquil. He is credited with shrewdly managing the Hamas campaign, which emphasized corruption and disorder under Fatah and minimized Hamas’ founding principle of the destruction of Israel.

Many view Hamas’ decision to take part in national elections -- and to observe a halt in suicide bombings for nearly a year leading up to the vote -- as signs of the group’s evolution.

Yet Haniya, to some, benefits by comparison with Hamas firebrands such as Zahar.

Zahar “is the bad cop, and Haniya the good cop. When they want to put a nice face, they put Haniya,” said Yoram Schweitzer, a scholar at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. “He represents a current within Hamas that is willing to consider more and more pragmatic steps.”

Schweitzer and others note that Haniya’s stances remain in line with those of Hamas leaders viewed as hard-liners. Israeli officials maintain that Haniya fits Hamas’ extremist profile.

“He’s less of a firebrand and he’s disciplined in what he says. But he is clearly in the Hamas mainstream,” said Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev. “He has never dissociated himself from the movement’s radical positions and extreme actions.”

With Haniya as prime minister, the power center of the Palestinian Authority may shift from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip, home to Hamas’ biggest base, and to many of the Palestinians’ biggest woes.

Since the election, Haniya’s home in the crowded Shati refugee camp has served as a makeshift headquarters for the embryonic government. Well-wish- ers and other visitors troop steadily in and out of the three-story house.

“From 9 o’clock in the morning until 1 or 2 o’clock after midnight, continuously, we have people coming. Some people come to congratulate him and some people come to ask about the future,” said Moaz Haniya, 21, one of Haniya’s 13 children.

The younger Haniya said his father’s new prominence does not mean leaving the impoverished Shati camp.

“He will stay in the camp,” Moaz Haniya said. “He worked to become prime minister from here and he will stay here.”