'If a leader leaves, another will come': Ismail Haniyeh's last words

As if he knew his time had come, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh's last words before he was assassinated in Tehran were a Quranic verse about life, death, immortality and resilience.

"It is Allah who gives life and causes death. And Allah is all-aware of all actions ... 'If a leader leaves, another will arise'," Haniyeh said in Arabic. A few hours later he was killed in a suspected Israeli strike on his guest house.

The comment, broadcast on television as Haniyeh addressed Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, reflected deeply-held beliefs that shaped his life and approach to the Palestinians' conflict with Israel, one inspired by the late Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who preached Holy Struggle against Israel in the 1980s.

Israel jailed and assassinated Yassin in 2004, but Hamas grew to become a powerful Palestinian resistance movement.

In a Reuters interview in Gaza in 1994, Haniyeh, who was buried in Qatar on Friday, said Yassin had taught them that Palestinians can only recover their occupied homeland through "the purified arms of its men and their struggle."

'All the martyrs of Palestine are my children'

No Muslim should die in his bed while "Palestine" remains occupied, he quoted Yassin as saying.

For Palestinian supporters, Haniyeh and the rest of the Hamas leadership are fighters for liberation from Israeli occupation, keeping their cause alive when international diplomacy has failed them.

He said he learnt from Sheikh Yassin "the love of Islam and sacrifice for this Islam and not to kneel to tyrants and despots."

Haniyeh became the tough-talking face of the Palestinian group's international diplomacy as war raged back in Gaza, where three of his sons - Hazem, Amir and Mohammad - and four of his grandchildren were killed in an Israeli air strike in April. At least 60 other members of his extended family were also killed in the Gaza war.

"The blood of my children is not more valuable than the blood of the children of the Palestinian people ... All the martyrs of Palestine are my children," he said after their deaths.

"Through the blood of the martyrs and the pain of the injured, we create hope, we create the future, we create independence and freedom for our people," he said. “We say to the occupation that this blood will only make us more steadfast in our principles and attachment to our land."

Haniyeh is the third Hamas leader to be assassinated by Israel over the past two decades. Israel killed Sheikh Yassin and his successor Abdel-Aziz al Rantissi within a month of each other in helicopter air strikes in 2004