Who was Said Mohammad Siyam?

By Matthew Levitt

Sheikh Said Mohammad Siyam, killed in an Israeli airstrike this week, was one of the most senior political and military leaders of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. His death is a significant loss to Hamas, both politically and militarily. Indeed, he offers a telling case study of the types of leaders now running Hamas in Gaza.

Born in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza , Siyam became a former protégé of Sheik Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, co-founder of Hamas, and was a former teacher at an UNWRA school. An early member of Hamas, he was first arrested during the First Intifada, in 1988, by Israel for security offenses and for his membership to the organization. Four years later, in 1992, he was one of the hundreds of Hamas members deported to southern Lebanon. He emerged as a spokesman of Hamas in early 2004. In the 2006 elections, Siyam won a seat in the Palestinian Parliament, representing Gaza City. Shortly after, he was appointed Interior Minister, where he established Hamas’s Executive Force. In a 2007 interview with Ma’an News Agency, he stated that the Executive Force was one of his achievements “which I felt proud of.” The Executive Force, under Siyam’s direction, played a significant role in armed confrontation with Fatah. Considered a hardline leader, Siyam lost his cabinet posts when Fatah and Hamas formed a short-lived national unity government in March 2007. He was soon appointed as the head of Hamas’s Parliamentary Bloc by the Shura Council. Siyam’s influence in the Gaza Strip continued to grow, as he was a leader of the Executive Force, and he was instrumental in Hamas’s take over of the Gaza Strip in June 2007. In the Hamas government, Siyam was considered to have the role of Defense Minister. He was killed on January 15, 2009 by a bomb dropped by the Israeli Air Force. His assassination is the second, after Nizar Rayyan, of Hamas’s top leadership in the Gaza Strip.

For the Hamas, politics and terrorism are just two equally legitimate and viable tactics to reach their desired goals. It should therefore not surprise that Hamas seeks to muddy the waters between its political, social and military activities.

Nor should anyone have been shocked when Hamas took pages straight from the Hezbollah playbook and developed a coherent strategy leveraging parallel and complementary political, social, military and terrorist activities.

As the international community presses the parties to conclude a ceasefire agreement, one critical yardstick by which any agreement must be measured is not only its focus on preventing Hamas from rearming through the Rafah tunnels but also the extent to which it denies Hamas political victories for its recent military adventurism. Said Siyam school of Hamas leadership -- effortlessly merging terrorsim and politics -- must not be allowed to carry the day.