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“I think this war will give him even more leverage and more power,” said Khaled Al Hrboub, director of the Cambridge University Project for Arab Media and the author of several books on the hardline Islamist movement Mr. Meshaal leads. If so, it would not be the first time Mr. Meshaal, decried by most in the West as a terrorist and murderer, has snatched personal victory from near-defeat.

Since the death of Yasser Arafat, he has become one of the most visible faces of the Palestinian cause, granting interviews to outlets around the world. But for all that, he remains something of an enigma.

Those who have met him read him in radically different ways. They describe him as everything from arrogant and aloof to thoughtful, measured and eager to listen. They say he is, by turns, a pragmatic realist and radical fanatic, but always with a keen sense of self-preservation.

Born in 1956 in Silwad, near Ramallah, in the West Bank, Mr. Meshaal fled with his family in 1967, after the Six Day War. After a brief stretch in Jordan, they settled in Kuwait, alongside hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians.

Mr. Meshaal’s father was an imam, so his upbringing was deeply influenced by Islam.

“I was, thank God, raised in an atmosphere of religion, morality, conservatism and commitment,” he said in a lengthy interview published in 2008 in the [itals]Journal of Palestine Studies.[enditals]

“I did not experience lost or wayward years in my youth, but was committed to prayer and religiosity from a young age.”