The Israeli army confirmed Thursday, October 17, the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinouar, considered one of the architects of the unprecedented attack carried out by the Palestinian Islamist movement on October 7, 2023 on Israeli soil. The army and domestic intelligence services “confirm that after a year-long hunt, yesterday (Wednesday), October 16, 2024, Israeli army soldiers eliminated Yahya Sinouar, the leader of the terrorist organization Hamas during an operation in the southern Gaza Strip,” the army said in a statement.
Yahya Sinouar, radical activist and man in the shadows, is considered one of the masterminds of the attack of unprecedented scale carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023 on Israeli soil, which sparked the war in the Palestinian territory and ignited the powder in the region.
“The mass murderer Yahya Sinouar, responsible for the massacre and atrocities on October 7, was eliminated by the soldiers (of the Israeli forces),” Mr. Katz said in a statement to the press. “During the army’s operations in the Gaza Strip, three terrorists were eliminated,” the army said earlier in a statement, with an Israeli security source specifying that DNA analyzes were being carried out on one body to confirm if it is indeed Sinouar. Israeli President Isaac Herzog says Yahya Sinouar is ‘responsible for heinous acts of terrorism’
Aged 61 and leader since 2017 of the Palestinian Islamist movement in Gaza, he was named political leader of Hamas in early August after the death of Ismaïl Haniyeh, killed in Tehran on July 31 in an attack blamed on Israel, which did not not commented. Hamas has not confirmed.
Shortly after the attack on October 7, 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared: “Every member of Hamas is a dead man.” Before Mr. Katz’s announcement, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant wrote on X: “We will reach every terrorist and we will eliminate them.”
The leader of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson hailed the death of Yahya Sinouar as a “source of hope”.
Explosive context
These declarations come in an explosive context in the Middle East, where Israel has been shelling the positions of Hezbollah in Lebanon since September 23, which had opened a cross-border front on October 8, 2023 in support of Hamas. On September 30, the Israeli army launched ground operations in southern Lebanon to combat the Lebanese Islamist movement.
At midday Thursday, strikes targeted several regions in the south and east of Lebanon, Hezbollah strongholds including the southern suburbs of Beirut. Earlier, an Israeli strike targeted Hezbollah’s “weapons warehouse” in Latakia in Syria, stronghold of President Bashar al-Assad, wounding two people, according to Syrian media and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The United States, Israel’s ally, for its part announced that it had struck five underground munitions depots of the Houthis, who control large swaths of Yemen and carry out attacks against Israel and ships allegedly linked to them, in support of Hamas. .
After weakening Hamas in Gaza, Israel shifted the bulk of its military operations to the Lebanese front. In almost a month, at least 1,373 people have been killed in the country, according to an AFP count based on official data, with the UN recording nearly 700,000 displaced people.
Iran, ally of the Syrian regime, Houthi rebels, Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas, threatened Thursday to “painfully” attack Israel if it struck targets “in Iran or in the region”, in response to the missile attack carried out by Tehran on Israeli territory on October 1 to which Israel vowed to respond. This attack was presented by Iran as retaliation for the assassination of Ismaïl Haniyeh, and that of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, killed in an Israeli strike on September 27 near Beirut.
The head of Iranian diplomacy, Abbas Araghchi, met Thursday in Cairo with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi. They discussed the “need to stop regional escalation” and achieve a ceasefire in Lebanon and Gaza, according to the Egyptian presidency. Hezbollah for its part claimed Thursday to have fired rockets against Israeli troops near the Syrian Golan Heights annexed by Israel, and destroyed two Israeli tanks in southern Lebanon.
Israel says it wants to neutralize Hezbollah on the border to allow the return to northern Israel of some 60,000 people displaced by its incessant shooting over the past year.
Risk of famine in the Gaza Strip
In the Gaza Strip, at least 14 people were killed Thursday in an Israeli strike on the Abou Hussein school housing displaced people in the Jabalia camp in the north, according to two hospitals in the area, with the Israeli army indicating that it had targeted Palestinian fighters.
Jabalia has been surrounded and shelled since October 6 by the Israeli army, which claims that Hamas is trying to reconstitute its forces there. The fate of hundreds of thousands of Gazans trapped in fighting is at the center of international concern.
Some 345,000 Palestinians will face hunger at “catastrophic” levels this winter, compared to 133,000 currently, the UN warned in a report released Thursday. The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), Philippe Lazzarini, pointed out a “real risk” of famine in the besieged and devastated Palestinian territory, accusing “certain members of the Israeli government” of make “a weapon of war”.