Ali Baraka

Ali Abd al-Rahman Baraka is a senior member of Hamas abroad and serves as the head of the movement’s International Relations Department. He was born in 1966 in the Burj al-Shamali refugee camp near the city of Tyre in Lebanon, to a Palestinian family originally from the village of Saffuriyya near Nazareth. In his youth, he was a member of the Islamic Group (al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya). In 1982, during the First Lebanon War, he was arrested by Israel at the age of 16 and sent to the Atlit detention camp. He was later transferred to the Ansar detention camp in southern Lebanon, where he established ties with prominent Palestinian activists. In 1992, he formally joined the ranks of Hamas. From 2011 to 2019, he served as the movement’s official representative in Lebanon, and in 2020 he was appointed head of Hamas’s External Relations.