'Abdul Aziz Rantisi was born October 1947 in Yibna, a small town between Ashkelon and Jaffa. When he was 6 months old, the family were made refugees from the 1948 war. With 200,000 others, they fled to Gaza (then home to 80,000 people), expecting to return at war's end. Settled in Khan Younis Refugee Camp (second largest refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, at that time under Egyptian rule). (1998 interview: Q: Have you visited Yibna? A: Yes, and I have seen our house. I found a right-wing family living there. Q: How did that affect you? A: Very strongly. The image of my city, as my parents have told me, my home and my parents' flight with me in their arms does not leave my mind. In general, the issue of forced exile from our homeland has had a profound effect on my thinking).

Grew up in extreme poverty; lived with parents, 8 brothers and 2 sisters in a tent for four years, then in an abandoned school building, before moving into an UNRWA mud house. Started working at age 6 to supplement father's income. An uncle was killed when Israel shelled Khan Younis RC in the Suez crisis of October 1956. Rantisi attended the UNRWA secondary school in Khan Younis. Graduated top of his class in 1965. Egypt at that time offered university education to exceptional Gaza students who were too poor to pay tuition, and Rantisi began studying pediatric medecine at the University of Alexandria that fall. Professed no political or religious interests at that time, his main interest was in becoming a doctor. At Alexandria, he ran into a familiar face, Sheikh Mahmoud Eid, who had been imam of the mosque in Khan Younis when Rantisi was a child.

Rantisi completed his degree and returned to Gaza in 1972; founded the Gaza Islamic Centre in 1973. The Strip was by this time under Israeli occupation: its refugees camps provided thousands of recruits for Fatah and the PFLP, and anarchy ruled on the streets, with PLO activists targeting Israeli soldiers and local Palestinian collaborators. In 1974 he returned to Alexandria for his two-years Masters in Pediatrics. He Formally joined the Muslim Brotherhood on his return to Gaza in 1976. At that time he took up an internship at Nasser Hospital, the main medical facility in Khan Younis RC. (He was dismissed as head of Pediatrics there by the Israelis in 1983). He also joined the Faculty of Science at the Islamic University of Gaza, on its opening in 1978, teaching science, genetics and parasitology there.

Co-founder and principal spokesman of Hamas, he became Hamas' leader in the Gaza Strip on the assassination of Ahmad Yassin, 22 March 2004.

Today he died, brutally assassinated by Israeli Occupying Forces.

From the 1998 interview cited above:

I see that you have no security men. Aren't you afraid of being killed or assassinated?