Latest news with #Sinwar
Fox News
23-06-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
The unintended consequences of Hamas's war on Israel for the US and global security
JERUSALEM — Deceased Hamas terrorist leader Yahya Sinwar envisioned that his invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 would prompt his allies Hezbollah and all the Iran-backed proxies to launch a full-scale war against America's key Middle East ally, Israel. The long-stated goal of the troika of terrorist regimes — Hamas, Iran and Hezbollah — was the end of the Jewish state. What Sinwar dreamed about on October 7, however, has turned into a series of devastating unintended consequences for Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the regime's "Axis of Resistance." President Donald Trump's decision to attack Iran's core nuclear facilities on Saturday was perhaps the most telling example of Sinwar's plan being turned upside down. A leading Israeli security expert from the Israel Alma Research and Education Center, Sarit Zehavi, told Fox News Digital, "In general, if you talk about the October 7 effect, this is truly a huge change in the Middle East." The running list of setbacks for the enemies of America and Israel starts with the degradation of Hamas in 2024. Israel executed a James Bond-style operation on July 31, 2024, resulting in the elimination of Ismail Haniyeh in Iran, the Palestinian terrorist who oversaw the Hamas Political Bureau. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who is currently hiding in a bunker, pledged retaliation. In October 2024, Israel killed Hamas' Gaza-based leader Sinwar. Just last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced his country's forces had eliminated Sinwar's brother, Mohammed, a key terrorist responsible for the construction of the massive terror tunnel system on Israel's south border. The Israel Defense Forces' (IDF's) targeted killing of Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in September 2024 was part and parcel of the Jewish state's successful campaign to decapitate the leadership of the terrorist group in Beirut. Just days before Nasrallah's demise, Israel's foreign intelligence agency, Mossad, activated a hack attack that caused explosions of handheld pagers carried by thousands of members of Hezbollah. In December, Fox News Digital exclusively reported on Hezbollah's secret plan to invade Israel. Israel's decimation of a significant part of Hezbollah seems to have generated deterrence. Hezbollah has not entered the current full-blown war between Israel and Iran's regime. Tehran expected Hezbollah's intervention in a war with the Jewish state. Zehavi said while Sinwar perhaps made a tactical decision to invade, she cautioned about giving too much credit to Sinwar. She noted Mohammed Said Izadil, who Israel reportedly eliminated on Saturday and who oversaw the Palestinian affairs branch in the Quds Force, the branch of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, was "deeply involved" in the planning of the invasion on October 7. Zehavi noted that documents found by the IDF in Gaza revealed that Izadil knew in advance about Hamas' intent to invade Israel on October 7. Zehavi, who is an IDF lieutenant colonel (Res.), said, "It is too soon to tell where those changes will lead us" in the Middle East. The first effect of October 7, she said about the enemies of Israel and the U.S. in the Middle East, is, "Israel can no longer tolerate monsters who threaten its very existence. We are eliminating those monsters one after the other, with the support of the United States, which is also very important." She warned, however, that the open question is, will the terrorist regimes and organizations recover?"
Atlantic
23-06-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Sinwar's March of Folly
On May 26, 1967, the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, issued the following statement about a war he planned to start: 'The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel.' Nasser and other Arab leaders believed that the annihilation of the Jewish state was both certain and imminent. Several days later, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Ahmed al-Shuqayri, said, 'We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants and as for the survivors—if there are any—the boats are ready to deport them.' When he was asked about the fate of native-born Jews, he said, 'Whoever survives will stay in Palestine, but in my opinion no one will remain alive.' A short while later, on June 5, the Israeli government, believing the sincerity of these threats, launched a preemptive attack on Egypt and Syria, destroying their air forces on the ground. Six days later, Israel had gained possession of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula. One would think that Yahya Sinwar, until recently the leader of Hamas in Gaza, had absorbed the lessons of 1967. But he overestimated his own capabilities, and those of the Iranian-led 'Axis of Resistance.' Like the leaders of Iran, he spoke violently and with great confidence. He allowed his reasoning capabilities to be overwhelmed by conspiracism and supremacist Muslim Brotherhood theology. He also made the same analytical mistake Nasser had made: He underestimated the desire of Israelis to live in their ancestral homeland, basing his conclusion on an incorrect understanding of how Israel sees itself. In the end, the October 7 massacre Sinwar ordered did not cause the destruction of Israel but instead led to the dismantling of its enemies. Hamas is largely destroyed, and most of its leaders, including Sinwar, are dead, assassinated by Israel. Hezbollah, in Lebanon, is comprehensively weakened. Syria's Bashar al-Assad, Iran's main Arab ally, is in exile in Moscow, his country now led by Sunni Muslims hostile to Iran's leaders. Iran's skies are under the control of the Israeli Air Force, and its $500 billion nuclear program appears to be, at least partially, rubble and dust. Not since Nasser has anyone in the Middle East been proved so wrong so quickly. It is not at all clear how the latest Middle East war ends. It is not clear whether Iran and its proxies still possess the ability to hurt the United States and Israel in meaningful ways. And it is not clear if Israel will take advantage of its dramatic new security reality. But for now, there is a reasonable chance that the existential threat posed to Israel by the Iranian regime—ideologically committed to its destruction and to developing a weapon to carry out its vision—has been neutralized, perhaps for several years. In 2001, the former president of Iran, Hashemi Rafsanjani, said, 'The use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However,' he added, 'it will only harm the Islamic world.' For three decades, Israel and its longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, made the Iranian threat a singular preoccupation. But until the arrival of Donald Trump, no American president believed that the Iranian threat should be ended—to borrow from the language of the campus anti-Israel movement—by any means necessary. Trump may yet be remembered as a hypocrite who promised a clean American exit from the Middle East but found his presidency—like those of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan before him—hopelessly trapped in Iranian quicksand. His radical intervention in the Middle East may turn out to be catastrophic, particularly if Iran manages to find a quick way to save its nuclear program. But he could also be remembered as the president who averted a second Holocaust. What is certain is that the conventional components of the 'Axis of Resistance' are in dismal shape. The demolition of this axis happened because Israel, after the humiliation on October 7, reconstituted its fighting and intelligence capabilities in remarkably effective (and severely uncompromising) ways, and because Sinwar and his allies fundamentally misunderstood their enemy. The American attack on Iran's nuclear facilities happened because the country's leaders misunderstood Trump. But to be fair to Iran's leaders, Trump's national-security and foreign-policy impulses have been confusing even to his own supporters. The closest I ever came to a clear understanding of his contradictory and sometimes incoherent policies was in 2018, at a lunch in the White House with one of his closest aides. We were discussing an article I had published a few years earlier in this magazine, about Obama's foreign policy, and I said that I thought it might be premature to discern a Trump equivalent. The official responded, 'There's definitely a Trump Doctrine.' I asked him to describe it. He said, 'The Trump Doctrine is 'We're America, Bitch.' That's the Trump Doctrine.' The official continued, 'Obama apologized to everyone for everything. He felt bad about everything.' Trump, he said, 'doesn't feel like he has to apologize for anything America does.' Another White House official explained it this way: 'The president believes that we're America, and people can take it or leave it.' The Trump Doctrine, as articulated this way, doesn't leave much room for the contemplation of potential consequences. On the matter of Iran, in particular, Democratic presidents—Obama, most notably—spent a great deal of time studying second- and third-order consequences of theoretical American actions. It is not clear that Trump even understands the meaning of second-order consequences. This is one reason he struck Iran—because he was frustrated, and because he could—and one important reason the long-term outcome is uncertain. Sinwar's misunderstanding of Israel was, if anything, deeper than Iran's misunderstanding of Trump. Hamas and other Palestinian groups believe that Israelis see themselves as foreign implants, and therefore can easily be brought to defeat. Sinwar's misplaced confidence in theories of settler colonialism and Jewish perfidy undermined his strategic effectiveness. Sinwar was so convinced of his beliefs that he even sponsored a conference in 2021 called 'The Promise of the Hereafter—Post-Liberation Palestine,' in which specific plans were discussed for the building of Palestine on the ruins of Israel. 'Educated Jews and experts in the areas of medicine, engineering, technology, and civilian and military industry should be retained in Palestine for some time and should not be allowed to leave and take with them the knowledge and experience that they acquired while living in our land and enjoying its bounty,' one presentation read. The theme of this conference, which was held in Gaza, was an echo of a statement made by Hassan Nasrallah, then the leader of Hezbollah, who said in 2000, 'This Israel, with its nuclear weapons and most advanced warplanes in the region, I swear by Allah, is actually weaker than a spider's web … Israel may appear strong from the outside, but it's easily destroyed and defeated.' Nasrallah was assassinated by Israel nine months ago. I asked Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, in Jerusalem, to explain the root of this misapprehension. 'The only way you can believe that Israel is Nasrallah's spiderweb is if you believe that we don't have substance here, that we're not a rooted people,' he said. 'The problem with Sinwar is that he believed his own propaganda. He believed that we ourselves believe that we don't belong here. Our enemies in the Arab and Muslim worlds don't understand that their perception of Israel and of Jews is based on a lie.' If nothing else, the wars of the past 20 months have proved that Israel's adversaries are not adept at analyzing political and social phenomena as they manifest in reality. Walter Russell Mead, the historian, once explained that a weakness of anti-Semites is that they have difficulty understanding the world as it actually works, and don't comprehend cause and effect in either politics or economics. Sinwar, Nasrallah, and Ayatollah Khamenei himself saw Israel as they wished it was, not as it actually is. And in part because of this, they placed their movements in mortal danger.
Sydney Morning Herald
10-06-2025
- Politics
- Sydney Morning Herald
Inside the secret tunnel where Israel says a senior Hamas leader died
Two feet wide and less than six feet tall, the tunnel led deep beneath a major hospital in the southern Gaza Strip. The underground air bore the stench of what smelled like human remains. After walking about 40 metres along the tunnel, we found the likely cause. In a tiny room to which the tunnel led, the floor was stained with blood. It was here, according to the Israeli military, that Mohammed Sinwar – one of Hamas' top militant commanders – was killed last month after a nearby barrage of Israeli strikes. What we saw in that dark and narrow tunnel is one of the war's biggest Rorschach tests, the embodiment of a broader narrative battle between Israelis and Palestinians over how the conflict should be portrayed. The military escorted a reporter from The New York Times to the tunnel on Sunday afternoon, as part of a brief and controlled visit for international journalists that the Israelis hoped would prove that Hamas uses civilian infrastructure as a shield for militant activity. To Palestinians, Israel's attack on and subsequent capture of the hospital compound highlighted its disregard for civilian activity. Last month, the military ordered the hospital's staff and patients to leave the compound, along with the residents of the surrounding neighbourhoods. Then, officials said, they bored a huge hole, about nine metres deep, in a courtyard within the hospital grounds. Soldiers used that hole to gain access to the tunnel and retrieve Sinwar's body, and they later escorted journalists there so we could see what they called his final hiding place. There are no known entrances to the tunnel within the hospital itself, so we lowered ourselves into the Israeli-made cavity using a rope. To join this controlled tour, the NYT agreed not to photograph most soldiers' faces or publish geographic details that would put them in immediate physical danger. To the Israelis who brought us there, this hiding place, directly underneath the emergency department of the European Gaza Hospital, is emblematic of how Hamas has consistently endangered civilians and broken international law by directing its military operations from the cover of hospitals and schools. Hamas has also dug tunnels underneath Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and a United Nations complex elsewhere in that city. 'We were dragged by Hamas to this point,' Brigadier General Effie Defrin, the chief Israeli military spokesperson, said at the hospital on Sunday afternoon. 'If they weren't building their infrastructure under the hospitals, we wouldn't be here. We wouldn't attack this hospital.' Defrin said Israel had tried to minimise damage to the hospital by striking the area around its buildings, without a direct hit on the medical facilities themselves. 'The aim was not to damage the hospital and, as much as we could, to avoid collateral damage,' he said. To the Palestinians who were forced from here, the Israeli attack on Sinwar embodied Israel's willingness to prioritise the destruction of Hamas over the protection of civilian life and infrastructure, particularly the health system. According to the World Health Organisation, Israel has conducted at least 686 attacks on health facilities in Gaza since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, damaging at least 33 of Gaza's 36 hospitals. Many, like the European Gaza Hospital, are now out of service, fuelling accusations from rights groups and foreign governments – strongly denied by the Israelis – that Israel is engaged in genocide, in part by wrecking the Palestinian health system. Loading 'It's morally and legally unacceptable, but Israel thinks it is above the law,' Dr Salah al-Hams, the hospital spokesperson, said in a phone interview from another part of southern Gaza. Although Israel targeted the periphery of the hospital site, leaving the hospital buildings standing, al-Hams said the strikes had wounded 10 people within the compound, damaged its water and sewage systems and dislodged part of its roof. It killed 23 people in buildings beyond its perimeter, he said, 17 more than were reported the day of the attack. The tremors caused by the strikes were like an 'earthquake,' al-Hams said. Al-Hams said he had been unaware of any tunnels beneath the hospital. Even if they were there, he said, 'This does not justify the attack. Israel should have found other ways to eliminate any wanted commander. There were a thousand other ways to do it.' Loading Our journey to the hospital revealed much about the current dynamics of the war in Gaza. In a roughly 20-minute ride from the Israeli border, we saw no Palestinians – the result of Israel's decision to order the residents of southern Gaza to abandon their homes and head west to the sea. Many buildings were simply piles of rubble, destroyed either by Israeli strikes and demolitions or Hamas' booby traps. Here and there, some buildings survived, more or less intact; on one balcony, someone had left a tidy line of potted cactuses. We drove in open-top jeeps, a sign that across this swath of south-eastern Gaza, the Israeli military no longer fears being ambushed by Hamas fighters. Until at least the Salah al-Din highway, the territory's main north-south artery, the Israeli military seemed to be in complete command after the expansion of its ground campaign in March. The European Gaza Hospital and the tunnel beneath it are among the places that now appear to be exclusively under Israeli control. Under the laws of war, a medical facility is considered a protected site that can be attacked only in rare cases. If a medical site is used for military purposes, it could be regarded as a legitimate target, but only if the risk to civilians is proportional to the military advantage created by the attack. The Israeli military said it had tried to limit harm to civilians by striking only around the edges of the hospital compound. But international legal experts said that any assessment of the strike's legality needed to take into account its effect on the wider health system in southern Gaza. In a territory where many hospitals are already not operational, experts said, it is harder to find legal justification for strikes that put the remaining hospitals out of service, even if militants hide beneath them. When we entered the tunnel, we found it almost entirely intact. The crammed room where Sinwar and four fellow militants were said to have died was stained with blood, but its walls appeared undamaged. The mattresses, clothes and bedsheets did not appear to have been dislodged by the explosions, and an Israeli rifle – stolen earlier in the war, the soldiers said – dangled from a hook in the corner. It was not immediately clear how Sinwar was killed, and Defrin said he could not provide a definitive answer. He suggested that Sinwar and his allies may have suffocated in the aftermath of the strikes or been knocked over by a shock wave unleashed by explosions. If gases released by such explosions intentionally poisoned Sinwar, it would raise legal questions, said international law experts. 'It would be an unlawful use of a conventional bomb – a generally lawful weapon – if the intent is to kill with the asphyxiating gases released by that bomb,' said Sarah Harrison, a former lawyer at the US Defence Department and an analyst at the International Crisis Group. Defrin denied any such intent. 'This is something that I have to emphasise here, as a Jew first and then as a human being: We don't use gas as weapons,' he said. In other tunnels discovered by the Israeli military, soldiers have used Palestinians as human shields, sending them on ahead to check for traps. Defrin denied the practice. The tunnel was excavated by Israelis, he said.
The Age
10-06-2025
- Politics
- The Age
Inside the secret tunnel where Israel says a senior Hamas leader died
Two feet wide and less than six feet tall, the tunnel led deep beneath a major hospital in the southern Gaza Strip. The underground air bore the stench of what smelled like human remains. After walking about 40 metres along the tunnel, we found the likely cause. In a tiny room to which the tunnel led, the floor was stained with blood. It was here, according to the Israeli military, that Mohammed Sinwar – one of Hamas' top militant commanders – was killed last month after a nearby barrage of Israeli strikes. What we saw in that dark and narrow tunnel is one of the war's biggest Rorschach tests, the embodiment of a broader narrative battle between Israelis and Palestinians over how the conflict should be portrayed. The military escorted a reporter from The New York Times to the tunnel on Sunday afternoon, as part of a brief and controlled visit for international journalists that the Israelis hoped would prove that Hamas uses civilian infrastructure as a shield for militant activity. To Palestinians, Israel's attack on and subsequent capture of the hospital compound highlighted its disregard for civilian activity. Last month, the military ordered the hospital's staff and patients to leave the compound, along with the residents of the surrounding neighbourhoods. Then, officials said, they bored a huge hole, about nine metres deep, in a courtyard within the hospital grounds. Soldiers used that hole to gain access to the tunnel and retrieve Sinwar's body, and they later escorted journalists there so we could see what they called his final hiding place. There are no known entrances to the tunnel within the hospital itself, so we lowered ourselves into the Israeli-made cavity using a rope. To join this controlled tour, the NYT agreed not to photograph most soldiers' faces or publish geographic details that would put them in immediate physical danger. To the Israelis who brought us there, this hiding place, directly underneath the emergency department of the European Gaza Hospital, is emblematic of how Hamas has consistently endangered civilians and broken international law by directing its military operations from the cover of hospitals and schools. Hamas has also dug tunnels underneath Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and a United Nations complex elsewhere in that city. 'We were dragged by Hamas to this point,' Brigadier General Effie Defrin, the chief Israeli military spokesperson, said at the hospital on Sunday afternoon. 'If they weren't building their infrastructure under the hospitals, we wouldn't be here. We wouldn't attack this hospital.' Defrin said Israel had tried to minimise damage to the hospital by striking the area around its buildings, without a direct hit on the medical facilities themselves. 'The aim was not to damage the hospital and, as much as we could, to avoid collateral damage,' he said. To the Palestinians who were forced from here, the Israeli attack on Sinwar embodied Israel's willingness to prioritise the destruction of Hamas over the protection of civilian life and infrastructure, particularly the health system. According to the World Health Organisation, Israel has conducted at least 686 attacks on health facilities in Gaza since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, damaging at least 33 of Gaza's 36 hospitals. Many, like the European Gaza Hospital, are now out of service, fuelling accusations from rights groups and foreign governments – strongly denied by the Israelis – that Israel is engaged in genocide, in part by wrecking the Palestinian health system. Loading 'It's morally and legally unacceptable, but Israel thinks it is above the law,' Dr Salah al-Hams, the hospital spokesperson, said in a phone interview from another part of southern Gaza. Although Israel targeted the periphery of the hospital site, leaving the hospital buildings standing, al-Hams said the strikes had wounded 10 people within the compound, damaged its water and sewage systems and dislodged part of its roof. It killed 23 people in buildings beyond its perimeter, he said, 17 more than were reported the day of the attack. The tremors caused by the strikes were like an 'earthquake,' al-Hams said. Al-Hams said he had been unaware of any tunnels beneath the hospital. Even if they were there, he said, 'This does not justify the attack. Israel should have found other ways to eliminate any wanted commander. There were a thousand other ways to do it.' Loading Our journey to the hospital revealed much about the current dynamics of the war in Gaza. In a roughly 20-minute ride from the Israeli border, we saw no Palestinians – the result of Israel's decision to order the residents of southern Gaza to abandon their homes and head west to the sea. Many buildings were simply piles of rubble, destroyed either by Israeli strikes and demolitions or Hamas' booby traps. Here and there, some buildings survived, more or less intact; on one balcony, someone had left a tidy line of potted cactuses. We drove in open-top jeeps, a sign that across this swath of south-eastern Gaza, the Israeli military no longer fears being ambushed by Hamas fighters. Until at least the Salah al-Din highway, the territory's main north-south artery, the Israeli military seemed to be in complete command after the expansion of its ground campaign in March. The European Gaza Hospital and the tunnel beneath it are among the places that now appear to be exclusively under Israeli control. Under the laws of war, a medical facility is considered a protected site that can be attacked only in rare cases. If a medical site is used for military purposes, it could be regarded as a legitimate target, but only if the risk to civilians is proportional to the military advantage created by the attack. The Israeli military said it had tried to limit harm to civilians by striking only around the edges of the hospital compound. But international legal experts said that any assessment of the strike's legality needed to take into account its effect on the wider health system in southern Gaza. In a territory where many hospitals are already not operational, experts said, it is harder to find legal justification for strikes that put the remaining hospitals out of service, even if militants hide beneath them. When we entered the tunnel, we found it almost entirely intact. The crammed room where Sinwar and four fellow militants were said to have died was stained with blood, but its walls appeared undamaged. The mattresses, clothes and bedsheets did not appear to have been dislodged by the explosions, and an Israeli rifle – stolen earlier in the war, the soldiers said – dangled from a hook in the corner. It was not immediately clear how Sinwar was killed, and Defrin said he could not provide a definitive answer. He suggested that Sinwar and his allies may have suffocated in the aftermath of the strikes or been knocked over by a shock wave unleashed by explosions. If gases released by such explosions intentionally poisoned Sinwar, it would raise legal questions, said international law experts. 'It would be an unlawful use of a conventional bomb – a generally lawful weapon – if the intent is to kill with the asphyxiating gases released by that bomb,' said Sarah Harrison, a former lawyer at the US Defence Department and an analyst at the International Crisis Group. Defrin denied any such intent. 'This is something that I have to emphasise here, as a Jew first and then as a human being: We don't use gas as weapons,' he said. In other tunnels discovered by the Israeli military, soldiers have used Palestinians as human shields, sending them on ahead to check for traps. Defrin denied the practice. The tunnel was excavated by Israelis, he said.
Mint
10-06-2025
- Politics
- Mint
A surprising power shift inside Hamas
THE NARROW tunnel still reeked of decomposing bodies. A section was blocked by rubble created by two Israeli air strikes on May 13th. The tunnel was only opened by Israeli troops when they reached the spot, at the entrance to the European Hospital in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, nearly four weeks later. Five bodies were found in a small underground room beneath the emergency ward of the main hospital in Gaza's second-largest city. On June 8th one was identified as that of Muhammad Sinwar, the military chief of Hamas. The confirmation of Mr Sinwar's death changes little in and of itself. Hamas has already appointed a replacement and it has weathered the killings of many of its bosses. But it could shift the balance within the movement's leadership, formerly dominated by Gazans, just as Israel once again increases pressure on the coastal strip. The Israel Defence Force (IDF) opened the tunnel to journalists earlier that same day. It was the first time members of international news organisations had been allowed into Gaza for five months. This limited and controlled media visit (no foreign journalists have been allowed into Gaza independently since the start of the war in October 2023) had two purposes. The first was propaganda. The IDF was anxious to show that it had left the hospital building intact (though all patients and staff had been evicted), despite Hamas using it to cover its hideaway. This was rather undermined by devastation in and around Khan Younis, a city formerly of over 200,000 residents who have been forced to evacuate to a miserable 'humanitarian zone" near the Mediterranean coast. The second was psychological warfare. Israel hopes to prove to the surviving Hamas leaders, and to the civilian population they still control in Gaza, that they are running out of places to hide. One military official suggested the confirmation of Sinwar's death could be 'a pivotal moment" which could lead to Hamas accepting Israel's terms for a ceasefire. That ceasefire, brokered by America and Qatar along with Egypt, has been on the table in various forms for months. It would start with a 60-day truce during which about half of the remaining Israeli hostages would be released in return for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. During this period, Israeli forces would pull back from parts of Gaza and allow more aid in while talks would be held towards a long-term ceasefire. This last point remains the main obstacle to a deal. Hamas continues to demand guarantees for a permanent peace that Israel has refused to give. But in recent days, Hamas has indicated it is open to discussing new terms. The entry into the strip of limited quantities of aid through distribution networks over which it has little control may worry the group. The relentless destruction of Gaza by Israel's army, which threatens even more devastation, may too. And the death of Sinwar, the younger brother of Yahya Sinwar, the orchestrator of the October 7th attacks, may have influenced them, in part because it has changed the dynamics of Hamas's leadership. The new de-facto Hamas leader in Gaza is Izz al-Din al-Haddad, the commander in northern Gaza. He is the last of the veteran Hamas chiefs in Gaza. He was tasked with concealing and securing many of the Israeli hostages seized on October 7th and is still believed to control their fate. His new role, however—co-ordinating with the leaders of Hamas outside Gaza—is his first brush with the broader politics of the movement. 'Al-Haddad will have to decide now if he wants to be remembered as the man on whose watch Gaza was finally destroyed," says an Israeli intelligence analyst. 'He may prefer to be the last man standing after a ceasefire." Under the Sinwar brothers, the Gazan branch of Hamas, where the group originated, dominated. With them dead, the leaders outside the strip—in Doha, Beirut and Istanbul—have the upper hand once again. The movement has not replaced Yahya Sinwar as overall leader. Instead it is run by four men: Khaled Mashal, a former head of Hamas and long-time advocate of closer ties with moderate Sunni regimes instead of Iran; Zaher Jabarin, who represents Hamas's West Bank branch and is in charge of the movement's finances; Muhammad Darwish, a Lebanese-born Palestinian who has suggested that he might countenance Hamas relinquishing power in Gaza were it to be replaced by something like a national unity government; and Khalil al-Hayaa. A former deputy of Yahya Sinwar, Mr Hayya is the sole Gazan in the quartet and even he is now in Qatar. He is anxious to secure assurances that Hamas will be able to remain on the ground in Gaza after any ceasefire but looks increasingly isolated. The other three are expected to support a deal relinquishing Hamas's post-war role in Gaza but preserving its standing in the Arab world. This could make it easier to reach a ceasefire. So might political changes. The far-right parties in Binyamin Netanyahu's coalition who harbour ambitions of perpetual occupation and resettling Gaza have threatened to bring down the government if he ends the war. But other senior government officials have said recently they believe the conditions now exist for a long-term ceasefire. Increasing pressure from Donald Trump and Israel's other Western allies partly explains the shift. So too does a growing expectation that Hamas will accept conditions formally ending its rule of Gaza, including disarmament and the exile of some of its surviving leaders and fighters. Add to that the weakening leverage of Mr Netanyahu's far-right allies as the prospect of elections grows. The polls are currently scheduled for October 2026. But tensions within the coalition over demands by the ultra-Orthodox parties for an unpopular law exempting students of religious seminaries from military service could lead to a vote much sooner. Mr Netanyahu is wary of an election which he is likely, according to most current polls, to lose. But if he cannot prevent one, many in Jerusalem believe he would prefer to hold it after securing a ceasefire which led to the release of the remaining hostages which he could frame as a victory. A deal would also ease American pressure; Mr Netanyahu has no desire to go to the polls when he seems to be out of favour in Washington. Steve Witkoff, Mr Trump's envoy to the Middle East, is expected to return to the region in the coming days. He may arrive with a little more hope.
