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  Editorial

  Pakistan Times

GAZA CITY: Ahmad Ismail Yassin (Sheikh Ahmad Yassin) was born in a Palestinian village called Jorat Askalan in June 1936, the same year that witnessed the first armed revolution against the increasing Zionist influence in the Palestinian territories. Yassin's father died when he was five years old.

Yassin lived through the Palestinian Cataclysm (Al Nakba) of 1948 as he was 12, and survived it with a lesson that impacted his intellectual and political life forever, a lesson that says Palestinians can only depend on themselves and arm their people without depending on other nations or the international community.

The young Ahmad Yassin joined Al Jora elementary school and continued studying there till the fifth grade when the Cataclysm occurred. He was forced to immigrate with his family to Gaza Strip, where things changed and his family and he lived the life of refugees, as most of the Palestinians at that time, tasting the bitter feelings of hunger and deprivation. He used to go to the Egyptian army camps near Gaza to gather the soldiers' leftovers and go back with it to his family. Yassin quit school between 1949-1950 to support his seven-member family working in one of the restaurants in Gaza, and then returned back to school.

When he was 16, Yassin's neck vertebra was broken while playing with his peers in 1952. After 45 days of putting his neck in the cast, it turned out that this accident would change his life forever, as he was destined to stay in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

In addition to being a quadriplegic, Yassin suffered from several illnesses including blindness in the right eye, caused by severe beating during a round of interrogations in the Israeli prisons, as well as chronic otitis and lung allergy, also caused by harsh detention conditions in the Israeli jails.

Yassin graduated from secondary school in the year 1957/1958 and managed to get a job as a teacher despite objection to his health condition. Most of Yassin's income went to helping his family.

In his 20's, Yassin participated in the demonstrations that broke out in Gaza to denounce the 1956 tripartite aggression on Egypt, and showed immense public speech and political thinking skills. He became actively involved in the calls opposing to an international supervision over Gaza, stressing on the need to regain Egyptian administration over it again.

In 1965, Yassin's brilliance in public speeches drew the attention of the Egyptian intelligence in Gaza, so he was arrested in a campaign of arrests against the members of the Islamic Brotherhood movement, and was put in a solitary confinement cell for a month, until he was released after he was proved not to be involved with the Islamic Brotherhood. His detention period affected him significantly, and "rooted the hate of injustice" in his soul, as he says.

After the 1967 war, in which Israel occupied all the Palestinian territories including the Gaza Strip, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin continued inspiring the Muslims and Palestinians from the Al Abbasi Mosque's rostrum, calling to the resistance of the occupation. At the same time he was involved in gathering donations to help the families of the martyrs and prisoners, later to work as a president of the Islamic Complex in Gaza.

Shaikh Yassin follows the principles and ideology of the Islamic Brotherhood that was established in Egypt in 1928 by the Imam Hassan Al Banna. His Islamic preaching began annoying the Israeli occupying authorities, so he was arrested in 1982 and was charged of forming a military organization and possession of arms. The Israeli courts sentenced him to 13 years of prison.

But, he was released in 1985 during a prisoner exchange deal between the Israeli occupying authorities and Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) – The General Command.

After his release, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin founded the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in 1987, along with a group of Islamic leaders who follow the principles of the Islamic Brotherhood in Gaza Strip. Hamas aimed to resisting the Israeli occupation in order to liberate historical Palestine. Hamas had a significant role in the Palestinian Intifada that broke out at that time, and was known as "the revolution of the mosques". Since that time, Sheikh Yassin was considered the spiritual leader of the movement.

As the Intifada stepped up its momentum against the Israeli occupation, so the Israelis began to think of a means to stop Yassin's activities, so Israeli soldiers raided his home on August 1988, searched it and threatened him of banishment to Lebanon.

On May 18, 1989, Yassin was arrested along with hundreds of Hamas members after an escalated killing of Israeli soldiers and collaborators by Hamas. He was sentenced to life in prison plus 15 years on charges of inciting to kidnap and kills Israeli soldiers as well as founding of Hamas movement and its military wing.

During a prisoner exchange deal between the Jordanian and Israeli governments in October 1997, Sheikh Yassin was swapped with two Israeli "Mossad" agents captured by the Jordanians following a failed assassination attempt on one of Hamas figures there.

Sheikh Yassin lived ever since in his humble home in the Al Sabra neighborhood in Gaza City. He survived with minor injuries a failed attempt on his life by the Israeli occupying forces on September 6, 2003 while he was visiting a friend in Gaza.

The founder and the spiritual leader of Islamic resistance movement (Hamas), Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was killed on the day break of Monday along with two oh his bodyguards and five other bystanders when the Israeli helicopters fired three missiles at a car carrying the wheelchair-bound Sheikh as he left a mosque near his house in Al Sabra neighborhood, southwest of Gaza City.