I was in Palestine in 2006 when Ismail Haniyeh was fairly and freely elected as the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority in an overwhelming landslide. He would have been completely within his democratic mandate to exclude Fatah from his cabinet. Instead he reached out and offered them a unity government. This was rejected by the collaborationist current in the Fatah movement and the status quo PA regime, whose entire purpose has always been to collaborate with the Israeli occupation, and which immediately sought to overturn the election result (with the backing of the US, Israel, Jordan, France and the UK). The short lived unity government only came a few months later, but it soon collapsed when the CIA/Israel backed forces of Mohammed Dahlan and Mahmoud Abbas attempted a coup against the Hamas led elected unity government. This succeeded in the West Bank but was preemptively crushed in Gaza. Although he later arguably made mistakes on the issue of Syria, Haniyeh was a well respected Palestinian national leader that millions will mourn the loss of. And as with the Israeli murder of so many other Palestinian leaders before him, Israel will once again fail in its aim of crushing resistance. As long as Israel exists there will be resistance to its genocidal racist tyranny.