WIREDGOV

EXPERT COMMENT

Saleh al-Arouri told Chatham House Director Bronwen Maddox about his ambition for Hamas – and his long term strategy to achieve it.

There are some interviews you don’t forget. For me, high on that list was a conversation with Saleh al-Arouri, one of the leaders of Hamas implicated in the 7 October atrocities in Israel, who has just been killed in Lebanon by a drone strike. 

Israel has not responded to questions about whether it committed the drone strike – nor to Hamas’s furious accusation that it had made ‘a cowardly attack’.

But al-Arouri, one of the founders of Hamas’s military wing in the West Bank, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and a deputy to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, was known to be one of the names on the target list cited by Israeli officials in the wake of 7 October as they try to destroy the terrorist group.

Israeli troops demolished al-Arouri’s family house in the village of Arour, from which he took his name, high in the West Bank hills above Ramallah, at the end of October. The US had put a $5 million price tag on his head.

Click here for the full press release