The killing of Yahya Sinwar by an Israeli reconnaissance patrol in southern Gaza is a massive blow – but it doesn’t mean the end of Hamas as a military or political force.
The immediate task for the Israeli government is to seize the opportunity for realistic negotiations to get release for the remaining 101 hostages from the October 7th atrocities.
This may be easier said than done – as it is not clear who now has the authority, and capability, in Hamas in Gaza to achieve a safe handover. They are likely to be scattered in up to a dozen different locations and underground prisons.
President Biden and Vice President Harris have said this is now Israel’s priority. Kamala Harris says she sees this a real opportunity to bring the fighting in Gaza to an end.
“The war can end tomorrow, if Hamas lays down its arms and releases the hostages,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared in his reaction on television last night, but sounded a note of caution – “for now this is far from over.”
Sinwar was astonishingly single-minded, and had a psychopathic disregard for human suffering
Yahya Sinwar, 61, was the architect of the Hamas attack on thousands of Israelis civilians living in kibbutzim and villages close to Gaza on October 7th last year. Among the victims were thousands attending the Nova music festival. The plan had been prepared along with his fellow commanders Mohammed Deif and Marwan Issa, both believed to have been killed in Israeli strikes earlier this summer.
According to Israeli intelligence officers who met him during some twenty years in Israeli, Sinwar was astonishingly single-minded, and had a psychopathic disregard for human suffering. He was born in a refugee camp at Khan Younis in Gaza. One of his interrogators, Yuval Bitton, remembers him as being highly intelligent, and educated – teaching himself Hebrew in prison.
His vision was uncompromising – he believed that Israel should not exist at all, unlike Fatah the party leading the government on the West Bank. He devised the attack of October 7th as the beginning of the operation “to destroy the Jewish state.” In this he invoked the support of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
According to documents found in Gaza, Sinwar tried to get Iran to join an all-out attack on Israel in 2022. The Iranians hesitated, not least because Sinwar presented a bill of $500 million US, and requested Iran train 12,000 more fighters for the new operation.
He was prepared to sacrifice the wellbeing of his own people to achieve his aim, Bitton recalled in article in the Israeli daily Haaretz. “He really doesn’t care if 200,000 people are killed and not a single house remains complete in Gaza”, the officer concluded after one interview.
Israel now has two huge refugee problems on its doorstep
The Israelis are now searching for Sinwar’s younger brother, Mohammed, who they think might have taken over the command of Hamas forces. The Hamas leadership in Qatar, headed by Khalid Meshaal and Khalil al-Hayya, will now be levered to open negotiations for the hostages.
Israel now has to manage the occupation of Gaza. The United States and Britain will insist on greater access for aid delivery to the nearly two million displaced Gazans living in makeshift camps – now that more than two thirds of buildings are destroyed or damaged across the Gaza Strip.
The legacy of Sinwar and Ismael Hanya, the political leader killed in Tehran last July, is that Hamas will continue as an idea, a movement, and a military Islamist group. It has deep roots in the banned hardline Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. All this makes the boast of Benjamin Netanyahu to eradicate Hamas altogether in more than a year of war in Gaza seem less than realistic.
Israel now has two huge refugee problems on its doorstep, in Lebanon to the north in the battle with Hezbollah, an organisation with much greater firepower than Hamas, and in Gaza. It is also embroiled in the endemic violence of the occupied West Bank.
All three areas are sources of violence and terrorism threatening the people and state of Israel. Extremists in Israel have talked of reoccupying Gaza, bringing back Jewish settlements even, and expelling Gazan Palestinians. Few beyond the hard right in the Knesset, the parliament, would even countenance this.
But this highlights a hard truth now facing Israelis in Gaza, in the aftermath of Yahya Sinwar’s psychotic binge of violence. As the former US soldier statesman Colin Powell remarked, if you break a thing in war and politics, you own it.
Sinwar’s grim bequest is that Israel now owns the crisis of Gaza.
