New Hamas leader offers little hope for new negotiations

Less than a week after the killing of Hamas foreign chief Ismail Haniya, the Islamist terror group has appointed the Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, Jihia al-Sinwar, as the new leader of the organization. Hamas announced this on the Telegram platform. He is now the head of Hamas’ political office, it said. Sinwar is considered the mastermind of the Hamas terror attack on October 7, 2023. Around 1,200 people were killed in southern Israel.

Sinwar is at the top of Israel’s hit list. He lives in an unknown location in the Gaza Strip – it is suspected that he is hiding in the organization’s tunnels under the coastal area. His predecessor Haniya resided in Qatar’s capital Doha and was considered Hamas’s chief diplomat.

Born in the Gaza Strip, today leader of Hamas

Sinwar’s former deputy, Mohammed Deif, the commander of the Al-Qassam Brigades and thus the military wing of Hamas, was the target of an Israeli rocket attack in July. Israel declared him dead last week. Haniya, in turn, was killed last week in an assassination attempt in the Iranian capital Tehran.

Sinwar belongs to the founding generation of Hamas. He was born in 1962 in the refugee camp of Khan Yunis in the south of the Gaza Strip. His family comes from the area around the coastal city of Ashkelon, which is now on Israeli territory. He was imprisoned in Israel for more than two decades and learned to speak Hebrew fluently during that time.

When Hamas was formed in the fight against the Israeli occupation during the first Palestinian uprising, the Intifada, in the late 1980s, Sinwar was also involved in setting up Hamas’ military wing, the Qassam Brigades. In the early years of the Islamist movement, Sinwar was responsible for fighting suspected collaborators with Israel within its own ranks. He acted so brutally that he became known as the “Butcher of Khan Yunis.”