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.
Hamas will not be allowed to rule again in Gaza
With Sinwar gone, the futures of Hamas and the terrible ongoing war are now in question.
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