Already the leader of the Palestinian Islamist movement in Gaza since 2017, Yahya Sinouar, 61, was designated Tuesday evening as the new political leader of Hamas. He succeeds Ismail Haniyeh, assassinated in Iran a week ago. Yahya Sinouar is described by the foreign press as the “architect” of the October 7 attacks in Israel, and as a personality who is both “radical” and “pragmatic”.
Long-time Hamas activist
The son of refugees, he grew up in a refugee camp in Khan Younis in Gaza, according to Qatar-based Al Jazeera TV. Yahya Sinouar joined the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas in the 1980s. According to the ECFR think tankhe “allegedly participated in the creation of Hamas’ internal security force (“al-Majd”) in 1988″, before being imprisoned “for having assassinated Palestinians whom he accused of apostasy or collaboration with Israel” according to Israeli judicial documents dating from 1989 and consulted by the American daily. New York Times. He will spend a total of 24 years in prison.
In 2011, Yahya Sinouar was released along with more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners “in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, kidnapped by Palestinian fighters during a cross-border raid in 2006,” the media reports. Middle East Eye. According to the EFCR, he was then placed on the list of Specially Designated International Terrorists (SDGT) by the US State Department in 2015. Two years later, he became the leader of the movement in Gaza. He then pushed for a strategy that was “radical on the military level and pragmatic in politics,” Leïla Seurat, a researcher at the Arab Center for Research and Political Studies in Paris, explained to Agence France Presse. “He does not advocate force for force’s sake” but “to bring (the Israelis) to negotiations,” according to her.
“An influential position”
“No decision can be taken without consulting Sinouar,” he declared in May New York Times Salah al-Din al-Awawdeh, a Hamas member and political analyst who befriended the new leader while both were imprisoned in Israel in the 1990s and 2000s. “Sinouar’s opinion is very important because he is on the ground and he leads the movement from the inside,” added Abu Marzouk, Hamas’ first political bureau chief in the 1990s.
“He rose to an influential position within Hamas,” analysis for Al Jazeera Nour Odeh, a Palestinian political analyst based in Ramallah, said Hamas’s choice to appoint him as the movement’s leader “now puts Gaza at the forefront, not only of events on the ground, but also of the dynamics of the Hamas movement,” she said.
Behind the October 7 attack
Yahya Sinouar is also considered “as one of the main figures linking the political and armed wings of Hamas,” recalls the think tank ECFR, “and as the architect of the attacks carried out by Hamas against Israel on October 7, 2023.” “It’s his strategy, he’s the one who set up the operation” probably for a year or two, researcher Leïla Seurat explained to Agence France Presse.
The attack killed nearly 1,200 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data. Of the 251 people kidnapped, 111 are still being held in Gaza, including 39 who died, according to the army. In response, Israel launched an offensive that has so far killed 39,653 people, according to data from the Hamas-led Gaza government’s health ministry, which does not provide details on the number of civilians and fighters killed.
By appointing Yahya Sinwar, Hamas “has chosen the option of extremism close to Iran,” considers an analyst for THE Washington Post. “The appointment of arch-terrorist Yahya Sinouar as head of Hamas, replacing Ismail Haniyeh, is an additional reason to eliminate him quickly and wipe this despicable organization off the map,” reacted for its part on social network X Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz.
“Yahya Sinwar was and remains the primary decision-maker regarding the conclusion of a ceasefire” in the Palestinian territory, declared Tuesday during a press briefing the American Secretary of State, Antony Blinken. The Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, rival of Hamas, judged for its part through the voice of one of its leaders, Jibril Rajoub, “logical” and “expected” the nomination of Yahya Sinwar, a “pragmatic, realistic and logical personality”.