GAZA, April 17 (Xinhuanet) -- Abdel Aziz Rantisi, the newly nominated leader of Islamic resistance movement Hamas in the Gaza Strip, was killed on Saturday after Israel blew up his car in Gaza City.

(Xinhua/AFP/File)

   Rantisi was born on Oct. 23, 1947 in the town of Yebna, or what the Israelis call Yavneh, south of Tel Aviv.

   His family fled to the Gaza Strip and became refugees during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war after the state of Israel was established. Rantisi was six months old in that time.

   He grew up among nine brothers and two sisters in the refugee camp of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip where he earned his elementary, preparatory and secondary education at the United States schools.

   Rantisi graduated from a medicine school in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1972. Later he earned a master degree majoring in infants' therapy at the same college before he worked as a physician at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in 1976.

   Married and father of six children, Rantisi was elected as a member of Gaza Islamic society or Al Mujama'a, which was
established by Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and member of the Arab Doctors Association and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.

   He had worked at the College of Nursing of the Islamic University of Gaza since 1978 as well as the College of Science and Biology.

(Xinhua/AFP/File)

   He was detained by Israel in 1983 after he refused to pay the taxes to the Israeli civil administration that was governing the Gaza Strip at that time.

   Rantisi was one of the founders of the Hamas movement, which was founded in December 1987 in the Gaza Strip. He was detained by Israel in 1988 and spent in Israeli jails for two and a half years for being a founder and a member of Hamas during the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising.

   He was deported to south Lebanon by late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1992 together with 425 activists and leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups. He was transported back to Israeli jail in 1993, where he stayed until 1997.

   He also spent in Palestinian jails about 15 months, but was released after his mother's death.

   The Palestinian police had tried twice to arrest him from his house, but failed after hundreds of Palestinians confronted them.

   Rantisi escaped an assassination attempt in 2003, in which his son was critically wounded.

   He was nominated as the new Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip shortly after Yassin was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City on March 22.

   Rantisi was also a writer and poet as he had written several poems and had a website for his writings about Hamas and the Palestinian cause.  Enditem