Hamas has announced that Yahya Sinwar, Israel’s most wanted man, has been chosen as the new head of the group. He succeeds Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in the Iranian capital, Tehran, last week.
Let’s take a look at Yahya Sinwar’s background. He has most recently been serving as the leader of Hamas’s military wing in Gaza. Israel holds him, along with others, responsible for the October 7th attack on Israel, which killed around 1,200 people and saw more than 200 kidnapped. The 61-year-old was born in the Khan Yunis refugee camp in southern Gaza. His parents were refugees. After his education, he was arrested by Israel at the age of 19 for what they called Islamic activities. Two years after the formation of Hamas, when he was just 25, Sinwar set up the internal security organization Al-Majd. In 1988, Sinwar allegedly planned the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers. He was arrested and imprisoned after a murder conviction by Israel.
The appointment of Yahya Sinwar as the leader of Hamas was unanimous by the organization’s leadership. It was always likely in the wake of the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, an assassination universally blamed on Israel, even though Israel has yet to comment directly on it. It was always likely that Yahya Sinwar would be the figure to take over. There were one or two other candidates, but Yahya Sinwar is by far the most prominent.
Hamas’s reaction to the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh is one of total defiance. By killing, if not a moderate, definitely the most pragmatic member of Hamas, Israel has now secured as the leader of Hamas the most radical figure within the organization—the man most committed to the use of violence, the man generally regarded as the chief architect of the dreadful Hamas attacks of October 7th last year. There is no interlocutor now for Hamas outside of the Gaza Strip. Everything is now going to be in the hands of Yahya Sinwar. Frankly, most of it was already before this, but he is now the undisputed political and military leader of Hamas.
It is going to make it very difficult, if not impossible, to conduct negotiations. It’s all a very cumbersome process of getting messages in and out of the Gaza Strip. None of that is going to be made any easier as a result of this. As far as the Israeli reaction is concerned, well, perhaps they anticipated that. Their attitude towards Mr. Sinwar is the same as their attitude towards anyone associated with Hamas, which is that he is a terrorist leader, a man with Israeli blood on his hands, and that they will not rest until he, like Ismail Haniyeh, is dead.
