Hamas has named Yahya Sinwar – its leader in Gaza and one of the planners of the October 7 terror attack on Israel – as the new head of its political bureau, following the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh last week.

Israel has publicly accused Sinwar of being the “mastermind” behind Hamas’ attack – though experts say he is likely one of several – making him one of the key targets of its war in Gaza.

He has remained at large in the vast warren of tunnels trenched beneath Gaza, moving frequently and possibly surrounded by hostages as human shields, US officials believe. Sinwar has not been seen in public since October 7.

The move consolidates Hamas under Sinwar, one of the group’s most powerful figures. Sinwar is seen as a hardliner and his appointment casts further uncertainty over truce talks already rattled by Haniyeh’s assassination.

In a statement Tuesday, the group announced “the selection of Commander Yahya Sinwar as head of the movement’s political bureau, succeeding the martyred leader Ismail Haniyeh, may God have mercy on him.”

Sinwar’s predecessor Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran last week, raising fears that Israel’s conflict with Hamas and its allies could develop into a multi-front, fully-fledged war in the Middle East. While the Iranian government and Hamas say that Israel carried out the assassination, Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement.

In response to Sinwar’s selection, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Daniel Hagari told the Saudi network Al Arabiya, “There’s only one place we are designating for Yahya Sinwar, and that’s right next to Mohammed Deif and all the other terrorists who are responsible for October 7 [attacks]. It’s the only place we are preparing and designating for him.”

Israel said last week that Hamas’ military chief Deif, was killed in a strike it carried out in southern Gaza last month – a report Hamas has neither confirmed nor denied.

Two of Hamas’ principal allies – Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad – have welcomed Sinwar’s new role. Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese militant group, said the choice of Sinwar “confirms that the objectives sought by the enemy through the assassinations of leaders and officials have failed to achieve their goals.”

‘Not good news regarding the deal’

The move raised immediate questions on the next steps for ceasefire and hostage negotiations with Israel.

Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’ political bureau, told CNN late Tuesday that the selection of Sinwar to replace Haniyeh means, “you [Israel] chose to assassinate those who negotiate, and we chose those who can oblige you to sign the agreement,” he said.

And one man who spent many years in Israeli prisons with Sinwar, Esmat Mansour, told CNN that his new role spells trouble for any future deal.

“As far as Israel is concerned, this is not good news regarding the deal, because it has considered the military wing and Sinwar to be the hardliners,” he said. “It’s Sinwar who holds the captives. Now all decisions are within his authority, the military as well as the political decisions, and the decision [whether to hold] negotiations.”

He added that Sinwar’s close relationship with Iran could mean other negotiating parties, like Qatar and Turkey, which have good relations with the United States, “lose their ability to influence the deal, or at least weaken their ability to influence.”

Analysts say that while Sinwar’s viewpoint has always been critically influential in the negotiations, his difficulty in communicating with the outside world means that the details of negotiating with mediators from Qatar and Egypt have fallen to other Hamas officials, led by Haniyeh until his assassination last week.

“Even though Sinwar was not physically at the negotiating table with the mediators, he has been consulted at every critical juncture in the negotiations,” CNN’s Jeremy Diamond said Tuesday.

“That often contributed to delays in the negotiations, with it sometimes taking days for messages to reach him and for his response to be received by Hamas officials in Qatar or Cairo.”

‘Returned the decision-making to Gaza’

A longtime figure in the Islamist Palestinian group, Sinwar was responsible for building up Hamas’ military wing before forging important new ties with regional Arab powers as the group’s civilian and political leader.

He was elected to Hamas’ main decision-making body, the Politburo, in 2017 as the political leader of Hamas in Gaza branch. However, he has since become the Politburo’s de facto leader, according to research by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).

He has been designated a global terrorist by the US Department of State since 2015, and was sanctioned by the United Kingdom and France.

Mansour told CNN that “Sinwar is a unifying name, there is consensus on that name internally for Hamas…They need a unified movement. Symbolically and politically Sinwar unifies the movement.”

Mansour said that other candidates who might have been in the frame would have run into opposition from Hamas’ international allies. “Sinwar has returned the decision-making to Gaza, and in this way they get rid of pressure from the host countries.”

At the same time “because he’s on the run, it means that the leadership will be collective,” meaning that other Hamas figures would have leading roles, Mansour said.

Some analysts say that Sinwar’s elevation now blurs or even extinguishes the distinction between Hamas’ political and military wings.

Devorah Margolin of the Washington Institute, who studies Hamas, posted on X that: “Prior to Oct 7, Hamas long tried to differentiate between its political and military wings. Today’s decision to announce Yahya Sinwar – [who] masterminded the Oct. 7 attacks – as the new politburo chief ends all misconceptions surrounding the group’s structure.”

Abu Hein said that Sinwar’s appointment as Hamas’ political leader “signifies, firstly, that the Palestinian cause is in a very dangerous stage, especially with the ongoing war on Gaza. Secondly, it shows that Hamas is a crucial player in the Palestinian arena on the international level.”

AfriPrime App link:  FREE to download...

https://www.amazon.com/Africircle-AfriPrime/dp/B0D2M3F2JT

Israeli military chief of staff says al-Sinwar is in army's sights

Military Chief of General Staff Herzi Halevi said on Wednesday that Israel is more determined than ever to hunt down Yehya al-Sinwar after he was named the top Hamas leader.

Al-Sinwar's selection on Tuesday as the new head of the Political Bureau of the Palestinian Islamist group came after the previous office holder, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated in Iran last week.

Al-Sinwar had previously been the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, where he has eluded Israeli forces for the past 10 months of war. He was one of the masterminds of the October 7 attacks on southern Israel that left some 1,200 people dead.

"The change in his title not only doesn't prevent us from pursuing him, it motivates us, and we will make the effort to find him, to target him, and for them to replace the head of the Political Bureau once again," Halevi said while visiting Tel Nof Air Force Base.

"We have carried out very important operations in recent weeks, eliminating the most senior commanders of our most problematic enemies, and we are not stopping."

As fears mount that a retaliatory attack by Iran and its regional allies on Israel is imminent, the general added that Israel was at "peak readiness, both in offence and in defence."

AfriPrime App link:  FREE to download...

https://www.amazon.com/Africircle-AfriPrime/dp/B0D2M3F2JT

Hamas' new leader Sinwar directed Oct 7 attack from Gaza

 Yahya Sinwar, named leader of Hamas on Tuesday, masterminded the bloodiest attack on Jews in a single day since the Holocaust, having made no secret of his desire to strike hard at Israel, the country that imprisoned him for almost half his adult life.

In December 2022, the militant leader told a rally in Gaza that the Palestinian group Hamas would deploy a "flood" of fighters and rockets against Israel, in a speech to supporters that bore the hallmarks of crowd-pleasing hyperbole.

"We will come to you, God willing, in a roaring flood. We will come to you with endless rockets, we will come to you in a limitless flood of soldiers, we will come to you with millions of our people, like the repeating tide," he said in his address.

Less than a year later, Israel discovered it was no idle threat, when Hamas fighters broke through Gaza's fence on Oct. 7, 2023, staging an assault that killed 1,200 people, took 152 hostage and broke Israel's reputation as an invincible enemy.

Sinwar, 61, who before Tuesday's announcement was the Hamas chief in Gaza, began his career as a ruthless enforcer who punished and killed collaborators with Israel, before rising to a leadership role after his release from prison in 2011 and his return to Gaza.

The war set off by the Oct. 7 attack laid waste to Gaza, as Israel sought to eliminate Hamas. Sinwar has been at the top of Israel's assassination list during the conflict.

By the time of the speech, Sinwar and the militant Islamists' military leader Mohammed Deif had already hatched secret plans for the Oct. 7 assault, the deadliest day in Israel's 75-year history.

Hamas regarded the attack as a major victory against Israeli occupation, but it drew condemnation from the International Criminal Court.

Its prosecutor said he had requested arrest warrants for Sinwar, Deif and another Hamas figure over the attack, and for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Nentanyahu and his defence chief over Israel's response which reduced much of Gaza to rubble.

Both Israel and Hamas dismissed the accusations and said they objected to the way the announcement of the request on the same day appeared to equate them with each other - though they faced different charges.

Heard in hindsight, Sinwar's words foreshadowed what was to come, an attack Hamas dubbed the "flood of Al-Aqsa," a reference to the mosque in Jerusalem that is one of Islam's holiest shrines and stands on a place revered by Jews as Temple Mount. Al-Aqsa has been subject to repeated Israeli raids.

Sinwar never made a public appearance after the Oct. 7 attacks, but directed military operations along with Deif and another commander. He also led negotiations for prisoner-hostage swaps, possibly from bunkers beneath Gaza.

In the days after the Oct. 7 attacks, Sinwar was seen by some of the captured Israelis in the tunnels, freed hostages have said. Hamas and Israeli officials did not publicly comment on the reported sighting.

The question of hostages and prisoner swaps is deeply personal for Sinwar, who spent 23 years behind bars, and has vowed to free all Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. He was one of 1,027 Palestinians released from Israeli prisons in a swap for a single Israeli soldier held in Gaza in 2011.

'DEAD MAN WALKING'

Born in the Khan Younis refugee camp, Sinwar was elected as Hamas' leader in Gaza in 2017. After Oct. 7, Israel's Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said he and other leaders were "living on borrowed time."

Before he was jailed, Sinwar rose to prominence as the head of the Al-Majd security apparatus which tracked and killed Palestinians accused of providing information on Hamas to Israel’s secret service.

Both Hamas leaders and Israeli officials who know Sinwar agree he is devoted to the movement to an extraordinary level.

One Hamas figure based in Lebanon described him as "puritanical ... with an amazing ability of endurance."

Michael Koubi, a former Shin Bet official who interrogated Sinwar for 180 hours in prison, said he clearly stood out for his ability to intimidate and command. Koubi once asked the militant, then aged 28 or 29, why he was not already married.

"He told me Hamas is my wife, Hamas is my child. Hamas for me is everything."

Sinwar was arrested in 1988 and sentenced to consecutive life terms accused of planning the abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers and the murder of four Palestinians.

In jail, his hard line against collaborators continued, Israelis who dealt with him have said.

At times, "he did not have Jewish blood on his hands, he had Palestinian blood on his hands," Yuval Bitton, previously head of the Israel Prison Service's intelligence division, told Channel 12 TV in October.

Bitton, a dentist who treated Sinwar, said Israeli medics removed a tumour in Sinwar's brain in 2004. "We saved his life and this is his thanks," said Bitton, referring to Oct. 7. Bitton's nephew was killed during the attack and his body taken to Gaza by the militants.

Koubi described Sinwar as being devoted to the destruction of Israel and to killing Jews. The senior Israeli official described him as a "psychopath", adding that "I don't think the way he grasps reality is similar to more rational and pragmatic terrorists".

Bitton added that the Hamas leader was willing to allow huge suffering for a cause and had once in prison led 1,600 prisoners to the brink of a mass hunger strike until death if needed in protest at the treatment of two men in isolation.

"He was ready to pay any price for the principle," he said.

AfriPrime App link:  FREE to download...

https://www.amazon.com/Africircle-AfriPrime/dp/B0D2M3F2JT

Hungry and displaced Gazans see their misery continuing with Hamas’ new leadership

Hamas’ choice of a hardline political leader did little to comfort Gazans displaced, hungry, and seeking a way out of their misery after nearly 10 months of war on Wednesday.

The Palestinian militant group appointed Yahya Sinwar to lead its political bureau on Tuesday, replacing Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in Tehran in an attack Iran blamed on Israel. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility.

The move consolidates power within the organization under Sinwar, who until this week was the head of Hamas in Gaza. Sinwar, a hardened militant with many years spent in an Israeli prison, is viewed as less compromising in dealings with Israel and closer to Iran than his predecessor. He is accused by Israel of being the mastermind of the October 7 attack and believed to be hiding in a tunnel in Gaza.

“I’m surprised about this move,” said Hatem Mohammed, 47, a Gaza-based retired civil servant for the Palestinian Authority that is run by Fatah, a rival party to Hamas. “It’s a hasty, irrational and reactionary move in response to Haniyeh’s assassination. They (Hamas) know internally that he’s not fit for the job. He’s an emotive and hasty person.”

The situation in Gaza, he told CNN, needs a leader who “knows politics,” like “Haniyeh, (former political leader Khaled) Meshaal or (senior Hamas member) Mousa Abu Marzook.”

“This appointment sends a message that the war will continue. I don’t know what they were thinking,” said Mohammed, who said he lost five members of his family in the war and suffers from infection brought about by food poisoning.

Israel’s war in Gaza has killed more than 39,000 people in the enclave, according to the Palestinian authorities. Sinwar, meanwhile, is believed by US officials to be deep underground, possibly surrounded by Israeli hostages as human shields.

Sinwar’s appointment has cast uncertainty on the fate ceasefire talks with Israel that would also see Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners released. He is hard to reach, is considered more hardline than Haniyeh, and is seen as being less vulnerable to pressure from Arab nations than Haniyeh, who lived in Qatar.

‘The death is all the same’

“We don’t care who they name (as leader). The names are plenty, but the death is all the same. All they’ve brought us is destruction,” said Ismail Jalal, a father of two in northern Gaza who says he struggles to find food for his sick children. “All we’re asking for is a ceasefire. Someone who will be able to reach a deal and save what is left of our people and the children that are dying daily… someone who can practice self-restraint, with no empty slogans.”

Abu Fadi Rafeeq from Beit Lahia, northern Gaza, and displaced in Khan Younis, said the decision to appoint Sinwar was “reckless.” The new leader is “stubborn” and “will let the entire population die just so he can keep his word.”

“He doesn’t suffer like me. He doesn’t go hungry like me. He hasn’t lost his entire family like me,” he told CNN, adding that he has lost 38 members of his family, including both his parents, his two sisters and their children, and two of his brothers’ wives.

“I lost everything. My house, my soul and my family,” he said.

Israel launched the war in retaliation to Hamas-led militants’ October 7 attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people and more than 250 abducted, according to Israeli authorities.

Despite some Gazans being disgruntled with Hamas’ choice of political leader, there are indications that support for the organization remains significant in the enclave.

Polling in Gaza faces multiple challenges, including population displacement, people’s reluctance to criticize Hamas publicly and the risks to personal safety in war time. But one survey conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research between May 26 and June 1 in the West Bank and Gaza showed that only 8% of Gazans blame Hamas for their suffering, with two-thirds blaming Israel. Of Gazan respondents, 46% supported Hamas returning to power in the enclave after the war. Satisfaction with Hamas’ performance stood at 64% and Sinwar’s at 50%.

“He’s the best choice to lead the next phase,” said Abu Ali, an injured Gazan who said he was a Hamas fighter. “He’s the only one who has lived this ordeal.”

AfriPrime App link:  FREE to download...

https://www.amazon.com/Africircle-AfriPrime/dp/B0D2M3F2JT

Hamas’ New Political Chief Sinwar Has Cunning, Brutal Past

 Almost six years ago, Yahya Sinwar, who’s just been named the political leader of Hamas, scrawled a note on a document that he knew Egyptian intermediaries would hand to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Take a “‘calculated risk’ on a cease-fire,” Sinwar wrote in Hebrew, according to former National Security Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat.

Not long before, when he was the new Hamas chief for Gaza, Sinwar had said something similar to an Italian journalist: “I don’t want war anymore. I want a cease-fire.” His ambition for the impoverished Palestinian coastal strip? “We can be like Singapore, like Dubai.”

For the past 10 months, since Hamas’ long-planned and bloody Oct. 7 assault, the Israeli security establishment and others have looked back on his words as part of an effort to create the illusion that Hamas, considered a terrorist group by the US and European Union, was limiting its embrace of violence to focus on governance.

Now, Sinwar has taken charge of a portfolio that includes cease-fire negotiations after the assassination last week in Tehran of Ismail Haniyeh, the previous Hamas political chief, solidifying control of the group by its fearsome military leader.

“Sinwar’s election effectively marks the subordination of Hamas’ political wing in its entirety to Sinwar,” Arab affairs commentator Avi Issacharoff wrote in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper on Wednesday.

Israeli officials have said that Sinwar was running cease-fire negotiations behind the scenes all along, a notion seconded by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who said that he’s been “the primary decider.” Others say Sinwar oversaw the talks at first but he’s now unable to communicate while hiding in Gaza and was given the political title as an act of symbolism, to tell Israel and the world that he’s the essence of the movement.

Before the deadly Hamas attack on Oct. 7, Israeli officials say, the sense of complacency about the group’s intentions created by Sinwar led the military to reduce its surveillance of the Gaza border fence, relying on electronic sensors, and to transfer troops to guard settlements in the West Bank. Ambitious intelligence officers were focused on Iran; Hamas was considered deterred.

Today, with much of Gaza reduced to rubble and some 40,000 people killed in the process, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, Sinwar is viewed not only as one of the assault’s masterminds but as the very symbol of Palestinian armed struggle. He’s the top target for assassination, assumed to be hiding deep in a Gaza tunnel, “like a little Hitler in a bunker,” as Netanyahu has often put it.

Sinwar’s new title “won’t excuse him from the fact that he is a murderer who was part of the planning and execution of everything that happened on Oct. 7,” Herzi Halevi, the Israel Defense Forces chief of the general staff, said Wednesday at an Israel Air Force base. “The change in his title not only won’t prevent us from pursuing him, it gives us even more incentive to find him and attack him — and they can appoint a new political leader once again.”

The Oct. 7 attack, in which Hamas killed 1,200 and abducted 250, and the subsequent war in Gaza are remaking regional — even global — politics, raising a risk of broader war. This is especially true in the wake of the recent assassinations of Haniyeh and a Hezbollah leader in Beirut. Israel is bracing for an Iranian response.

Still, it’s notable that the dynamic that gave rise to the current situation is one of intimate enemies. Sinwar and the Israelis have been watching and analyzing one another for decades.

Born in a poor neighborhood of the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis, Sinwar, 61, helped found Hamas’ military wing in the late 1980s as the first Palestinian uprising was underway. He later took on the task of rooting out Palestinians collaborating with Israel, and was found guilty by an Israeli court of killing at least five of them. Israeli military authorities, at the time still operating inside Gaza, sentenced him to life in prison in 1989.

Behind bars, Sinwar achieved deep fluency in Hebrew and knowledge of Israeli society, regularly reading newspapers along with the biographies of key Israeli figures. He also became the uncontested leader of Hamas prisoners. According to Israeli officials and a former Hamas activist, he continued to have collaborators killed while in prison.

Israeli officials describe him as a cold-blooded, magnetic leader; a compact, sinewy man whose close-cropped hair and beard have by now turned mostly white.

In the early 2000s, while in prison, Sinwar began experiencing headaches and blurred vision. He was taken to the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba where a surgeon removed a brain tumor, saving his life.

Betty Lahat, the prison system’s intelligence chief at the time, said in a TV documentary that she tried to use that event to recruit him as an agent.

“I said, ‘the state of Israel saved your life,’” she said. “I thought I could turn him into one of ours, but he wasn’t interested. He kept talking about the day he would be released. I told him you’re never getting out. He said there’s a date: God knows it.”

There was a date. It was Oct. 18, 2011, when Israel exchanged more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for an Israeli soldier held by Hamas, Gilad Shalit. Among those released was the man who drew up the list — Sinwar.

Because he’d killed fellow Palestinians and not Israelis, and was no longer young, some Israeli officials didn’t object to his being on the list. Others did.

“There was talk of how he was not a threat,” Michael Milshtein, former head of Palestinian research in military intelligence, recalled last year. “He doesn’t want to return to dangerous activity, he’s forgotten how to plan a terror attack. I tried to tell them they were wrong. Hamas is a mission for your whole life. It took him only a week to return to his connections and activities. Today, Hamas in Gaza is Sinwar.”

He rejoined Hamas at a senior level and by 2017 had been elected the group’s leader for all of Gaza, replacing Haniyeh, who was sent to Qatar.

After the October attack, a senior Hamas official, Ali Baraka, told the Russian state channel RT that the group had prepared for Oct. 7 for two years while fooling Israel into thinking it was “busy governing Gaza.” Planning encompassed not only the attack, but also how Hamas would rule in its aftermath.

That was the subject of a 2021 conference in Gaza entitled “The Promise of the End of Days,” where Sinwar delivered the keynote address. A summary document revealed it to have dealt with the topic of what to do with Israeli experts once the country was defeated: “Keep the Jewish scientists and experts in the fields of medicine, engineering, technology, civil and military industry for a while and do not let them leave with their knowledge and experience.”

While Hamas officials never spoke directly to Israeli authorities, Sinwar worked through intermediaries to persuade Israel of his group’s benign intentions. As part of these efforts, he collaborated with the Palestinian Authority to negotiate Israeli work permits for some 18,000 Gazans, allowing them to work as day laborers within Israel.

It was some of these workers who Israeli security officials say drew maps of the communities and made lists of local families to orient the Hamas militants before Oct. 7.

Several released Israeli hostages say that when they were first taken to Gaza, Sinwar came to see them, speaking to them in Hebrew. Israeli military officials say they’ve come close to capturing or killing him a couple of times in the war. So far, he has escaped.

Some 70 kilometers (40 miles) north of Gaza, a poster hangs on the wall of the office of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in Tel Aviv. It features dozens of Hamas commanders with lines drawn across the faces of those killed by Israel. The poster has been filling with marks.

Sinwar, unmarked, is at the top.

AfriPrime App link:  FREE to download...

https://www.amazon.com/Africircle-AfriPrime/dp/B0D2M3F2JT