Sami Abu Zuhri

Sami Abu Zuhri is a Palestinian politician and the official spokesperson of the Hamas movement. He was born on March 26, 1967, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. He studied at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he earned a bachelor's degree in History and Archaeology (1998) and a master's degree in Islamic History (2003). He joined Hamas in his youth and was involved in activities against the IDF. He was arrested by Israel and imprisoned between 1989 and 1994. He was among hundreds of Hamas members deported to Marj al-Zohour in southern Lebanon in 1992, where he stayed for about a year. In 2003, he served as director of the Oral History Center at the Islamic University of Gaza and as a member of the board of directors of the newspaper Filastin. He was later appointed as a lecturer in the Department of History and Archaeology at the university.