In 2006, soon after Hamas won the Palestinian election across Gaza and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), then-president Thabo Mbeki issued a public invitation to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh to visit South Africa. Haniyeh had just been elected prime minister of the Palestinian Authority.
Seventeen years later, last week, South Africa’s Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Naledi Pandor, spoke to Haniyeh on the phone, offering South African relief aid to Palestinians in Gaza who were being pummelled by a massive and merciless Israeli bombardment that had, by then, reduced more than one-third of the territory to rubble.
Haniyeh is now the top leader of Hamas, the party that
