It took more than a year of waging war, but Israel has finally succeeded in killing its top target in Gaza: Yahya Sinwar. Alongside Mohammad Deif, who is thought to have been killed by an Israeli strike in July, Sinwar was the man most responsible for organising the horrific attacks of 7 October. At the time of those attacks, Sinwar was the head of Hamas’s Gaza branch, but since August he had been promoted to the group’s overall leader, replacing the Qatar-based Ismayil Haniyah who was assassinated on 31 July while on a trip to Tehran. The group must now pick a new leader.
Having led Hamas’s Gaza branch since 2017, Sinwar solidified the group’s ties to the Iranian regime and integrated it in the so-called Axis of Resistance, a Tehran-led umbrella of anti-Israel militias in the region. He helped overcome a major rift between Tehran and Hamas which had developed earlier in the decade, most intensely during the Syrian civil war, in which the Palestinian group (in line with its Sunni Islamist heritage) backed the Sunni-majority Syrian rebels while Iran staunchly supported the government of Bashar Assad.
With Sinwar gone, the futures of Hamas and the terrible ongoing war are now in question.
Hamas’s next leader could emerge from the group’s military leaders who remain in Gaza – chiefly Mohammad Sinwar, Yahya’s younger brother – or from those operating in its exiled political wings in Qatar, Turkey or Lebanon.
Hamas’s internal dynamics have often been neglected by international observers. While there are factions of the group that are wedded to the Tehran-backed militancy, we mustn’t forget that it started life as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egypt-based Sunni Islamist movement which often eschews violent means. Parties of the Muslim Brotherhood family often prioritise electoral methods and have served in governments and parliaments in conservative pro-western monarchies such as Jordan and Morocco.
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