The Palestinian organization Hamas announced on Tuesday that Yahya Sinwar will be the new head of the group’s political office.
The announcement came as Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’ political bureau in Iran, was killed in an alleged Israeli strike last week.
The most senior Hamas leader in Gaza is Yahya Sinwar.
Israel’s most wanted man
Rear Admiral Daniyal Haghari, spokesman for the Israeli Defense Force, said after the October 7 attack, ‘This attack was decided by Yahya Sinwar. Therefore he and his companions are dead’, meaning that Israel is determined to kill them.
Among Sinwar’s associates is Mohammad Zaif, the commander of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas.
Hugh Lovatt, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), told the BBC: “It is thought that Zaif was behind the planning of the October 7 attack because it was a military operation, but Sinwar ‘Probably part of the group that planned it.’
It appears that Yahya Sinwar was involved in the planning of the October 7 attacks. In December last year, he addressed a rally in Gaza and said that Hamas was preparing to launch a major attack on Israel.
He had said, ‘Inshallah we will rain on you in the form of a storm. We will rain endless rockets at you, we will come at you with an infinite flood of troops, we will come at you with millions of our people.’
Although Sinwar has stayed away from the media, he has also held press conferences with the international media on some important occasions.
In 2018, Daniel Eastern, the correspondent of the American organization NPR, participated in such a press conference.
According to him, Sinwar said that he formulates his strategy with the help of lessons learned in Israeli prisons. Sinwar said that ‘just as the prisoners in the prison go on hunger strike for their rights, the Palestinians are protesting against their jailers to improve the conditions in Gaza.’
Eastern says that the future of Hamas depends to a large extent on Sinwar, which is why Israel, which is determined to destroy Hamas, has put Sinwar on its hit list.
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Sinwar’s family hails from the Palestinian village of al-Majdal Ashqlan, from which Israel expelled Palestinians in 1948. Now this area is part of the Israeli city of Ashkelon.
Sinwar was born in Khan Younis in 1962. He was just five years old when Israel captured this city.
He writes in his book ‘Thorns and Flowers’ (Al-Shuq al-Qarnafl) that ‘the winter of 1967 was very heavy, the spring was barely coming when suddenly it started raining and the mud houses of the refugee camp in Gaza City were flooded. Drowned. The flood water entered our house.’
He writes that at that time he was at home with his three elder brothers and one sister who got scared by the flood.
‘My father and mother picked us up in their arms before the floor was wet. My mother lifted the bed before the water entered the house. I was the youngest so I clung to my mother.
‘At night, my mother used to keep aluminum pots under the roof to catch the raindrops from the roof. Every time I tried to sleep, I could hear the tap of the water. When the pots were full, my mother used to empty them.’
As a teenager, Sinwar joined the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Gaza, which changed its name to the Hamas movement in late 1987.
Sinwar studied at the Islamic University of Gaza and earned a bachelor’s degree in Arabic.
During his studies at the university, he was also the head of the Muslim Brotherhood’s student wing ‘Islami Bloc’.
Sinwar founded the Muslim Brotherhood’s security wing in 1985, known as Al-Majjad. Its main goal was to resist the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip.
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2024-08-07 04:05:59
