Osama Hamdan

One of Hamas’s senior figures abroad, he is considered among the leading representatives of the organization’s positions in the international arena and in the media. He was born in the Al-Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. His family emigrated to Kuwait, where Hamdan attended high school. He later moved to Jordan, studied at Yarmouk University in the city of Irbid, and completed a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1986. During his university studies, he became acquainted with a group of Palestinian students who supported the Muslim Brotherhood movement, led by Khaled Mashal, which had been active since the 1980s. After completing his studies, he returned to Kuwait and worked in the industrial sector until the expulsion of Palestinians from the country following the Gulf War. He then joined Hamas’s office in Tehran, first as an assistant to the movement’s representative in Iran, and later, from 1994 to 1998, serving as Hamas’s official representative in the country. In 1998, he was appointed Hamas’s representative in Lebanon. In 2004, he was a member of the Hamas delegation to Cairo as part of the dialogue between the Palestinian factions, and also took part in talks with European political officials. During the war that broke out following the October 7 attack, Hamdan served as a prominent voice of Hamas in the international arena and across various media outlets.