Sheikh Ahmed Yassin

Spiritual leader of the militant Islamic Palestinian group Hamas

Ahmed Yassin, religious leader: born Majdal, Palestine 1 January 1929; married (11 children); died Gaza City 22 March 2004.

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was the spiritual leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, of which he had been a founder a decade earlier. He owed much of his fame and popularity among Islamists in Palestine and elsewhere more to luck and the unintended consequences of violent Israeli policies than to his own political cunning. Yesterday morning, as he was returning from a mosque in Gaza City, he was targeted and killed in a missile attack by the Israeli army.

In 1997 he was largely forgotten outside his circle of hardline Islamic supporters, tucked away in an Israeli jail, following an Israeli trial in 1989. The Palestinian Authority (PA) led by Yasser Arafat was content with the status quo, having locked up many supporters of Hamas opposed to a peace deal signed with the Israelis in 1993. Arafat was engaged in tense - often acrimonious - negotiations with the Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was accused by PA, Europeans, and even Americans, of trying to get out of implementing the 1993 Oslo Agreement signed by his predecessor Yitzhak Rabin, himself assassinated by a Jewish terrorist opposed to peace.

The Oslo agreement ended the 1987 Palestinian intifada (uprising) in which Yassin had played a leading role, and enabled Arafat and the largely secular Palestinian leadership to return from exile after secret negotiations with Rabin's Labour government, who realised the demographic threat to the Jewish identity of Israel if it continued its occupation of densely populated Palestinian land. The two sides recognised each other's right to exist, but this was rejected by Hamas, whose declared aim is the total elimination of the state of Israel.

Netanyahu ordered the assassination of Khalid Mishaal, the Hamas spokesman in Jordan, where Israel had full diplomatic relations. Two Mossad agents were caught red-handed spraying poison at Mishaal. Infuriated by the move, King Hussein of Jordan threatened to try the agents publicly if Israel did not provide an antidote for the nerve agent used against Mishaal. Israel was forced to release dozens of Palestinian prisoners, including Yassin.

Returning to a hero's welcome in Gaza, and later going on a tour of Arab and Muslim countries where he collected £35m in donations, Yassin became a thorn in Arafat's side. Unlike the Arafat administration, with its extravagant spending on its officials, Yassin was revered for never taking money for himself and his family - his wife Halima and their 11 children.

The donations enabled Yassin's organisation to start a massive welfare programme, competing with the PA and also recruiting thousands to the movement, while many released from Israeli jails started training to be suicide bombers. Arafat's PA had little choice but to take a tougher stance in negotiations with Israel in order to compete with Yassin, whose popularity soared in Palestinian areas and beyond.

He was born in either 1929 (according to PA official papers) or in 1936 (according to the Israeli army) or in 1938, according to Yassin himself, in the Palestinian fishing village of Majdal - renamed Ashkelon by the Israelis when they took it in the 1948 war, making Yassin and his family refugees.

A childhood sporting accident left Yassin almost completely paralysed and in recent years he was nearly blind, with poor hearing. But, for all his physical frailty, he had compelling charisma. He grew up in Palestinian refugee camps in the Gaza Strip. He became known locally as an Islamic religious teacher and spiritual leader. He would spend his days reclining on a mat in his three-room house in the modest Sabra quarter of Gaza City, reading the Koran and Islamic books, receiving disciples and settling disputes. But he had time for journalists and gave many television interviews. He did not so much speak as declaim, in language peppered with Koranic allusions.

The limited movements from his fingers became highly expressive gestures. He would underline fatwas, and declarations - setting up the Hamas political agenda - throwing back his head and rolling his dark eyes. He had many followers devoted to him, who would stand over his wheelchair, tenderly adjusting his white headscarf. They saw him as a victim with little physical strength, but with great willpower to resist the Israeli-imposed order; a symbol for Palestinian resistance, especially in times when aggressive Israeli actions - like the assassination of Palestinian leaders or the use of heavy armour in civilian areas - undermined the Palestinian Authority. Islamists, with Yassin's full approval, would repeatedly condemn Arafat and PA policy in dealing with Israel as ineffective.

In 1968 Yassin spent a year on a charitable scholarship studying in Ein Shams university in Cairo, and it is thought that it was there he was recruited by the Muslim brothers, believed to be at the origins of political Islam in the region. In 1970 Yassin organised the al-Mujama al-Islami ("The Islamic Compound"), which opened mosques, hospitals, libraries and did other philanthropic work, encouraged by Israel as a counterweight to Yasser Arafat's secular PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation).

After the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, Yassin founded the Majd al- Mujahedin ("The Pride of the Faithful Warriors"), a more radical group, and in 1987 Hamas (an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement, meaning "zeal"), with the goal of replacing Israel with an Islamic state. Hamas gained a reputation for ruthlessness, especially against fellow Palestinian Muslims suspected of collaborating with Israel. A policy condoned by Yassin until his death saw many suspected collaborators dragged to death in the streets.

Regardless of its violence, Hamas was not formally outlawed by the Israeli military authorities until 1989, fuelling the still commonly held belief among secular Arab nationalists that Israel and US intelligence fostered the group as a useful counterweight to Arafat's PLO.

Yassin was arrested twice by the Israelis. On the first occasion, in 1984, arrested for organising violence, Yassin stated during interrogation that he had founded an organisation of religious activists, with the goal of fighting non- religious factions in the territories, and carrying out jihad operations against Israel. The organisation used funds from Islamic activists in Jordan to acquire large quantities of weapons. Yassin remained in jail until released in May 1985 within the framework of a prisoner-release agreement.

In 1989, Yassin ordered Hamas to kidnap Israeli soldiers inside Israel, to murder them and bury their bodies in a manner which would allow Hamas to negotiate the exchange of bodies for Hamas prisoners, who would be released from jails in Israel.

With the banning of Hamas in 1989, Yassin and nearly 200 other group members were jailed in a mass raid. Eventually brought to trial before an Israeli military court, he acknowledged founding Hamas - but admitted to none of the other 14 charges against him. Yassin was arrested after the abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers. He was tried in Israel and received two life sentences for his involvement in these attacks.

Before he was killed yesterday, there had been previous attempts to assassinate Yassin. Last September a 500lb bomb was dropped on a house where he was lunching with friends - he escaped, but many were killed.

He saw the Allied strike on Iraq as "continuation of the Crusaders' aggression and war - therefore Muslims will have to threaten and strike Western interests, and hit them everywhere".

Adel Darwish