Former leader of Palestine’s Islamic Jihad movement Ramadan Shallah,62, passed away after long battle against illness.

Shallah, who served as secretary general of the resistance group from 1995 to 2018, died at the age of 62 on Saturday night, according to Lebanon's al-Manar television network.

The Gaza-based movement said in a statement that Shallah had been in a coma for more than three years. It didn't say where he died, but he is believed to have been in Lebanon.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas offered his condolences over the death of Shallah.

"By losing Shallah we lost a great national man," he said in a statement carried by the Palestinian WAFA news agency.

In April 2018, Shallah suffered several heart attacks and was transferred from the Syrian capital, Damascus, where he was based, to Beirut for surgery. He failed to regain consciousness.

The Palestinian embassy in Beirut said at the time that he may have been poisoned by Israel.

Shallah was born in Gaza in 1958 and studied in Egypt before earning a PhD in economics in the United Kingdom.

He led the Islamic Jihad movement for more than 20 years, after its founder, Fathi Shiqaqi, was assassinated in Malta in 1995 in an attack widely attributed to Israel.

In 2018, Shallah’s deputy Ziad al-Nakhalah was named as a new leader of the movement, which was founded in 1981 to realize the Palestinian cause in establishing an independent state.

Alongside the Palestinian Hamas resistance movement, a Gaza-based ally, the Islamic Jihad has defended the Palestinians against the Israeli regime during three deadly imposed wars since 2008.

The Tel Aviv regime carries out regular attacks on Gaza inhabitants under the pretext of hitting positions belonging to Hamas, which administers the territory.

Israel has launched several wars on the Palestinian coastal sliver of land, the last of which began in early July 2014. The military aggression, which ended on August 26, 2014, killed nearly 2,200 Palestinians. Over 11,100 others were also wounded in the invasion.

The Gaza Strip has been under an Israeli siege since June 2007. The blockade has caused a decline in the standards of living as well as unprecedented levels of unemployment and unrelenting poverty.

The Israeli regime denies about 1.8 million people in Gaza their basic rights, such as freedom of movement, jobs with proper wages as well as adequate healthcare and education.