O Hamas’ announcement comes a week after the death in Tehran of its predecessor, Ismail Haniyeh.
Sinwar has spent his entire career in the shadows, including in Israeli prisons, where he spent 23 years, and then in the security apparatus of the Palestinian Islamist movement, where he was responsible for purges.
Leader of the movement in Gaza since 2017, at the age of 61, he was the architect of October 7: on that day, hundreds of commandos invaded kibbutz, military bases and a festival in Israel, which experienced the worst attack against civilians since its creation in 1948.
The unprecedented Hamas attack resulted in 1,198 deaths and 251 people being taken hostage, according to Israeli authorities.
“The strategy is his, he was the one who set up the operation” probably for one or two years, Leïla Seurat, a researcher at the Arab Center for Research and Political Studies (CAREP) in Paris, explained to Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The Hamas leader, with white hair but thick black eyebrows, “imposed his pace to change the balance of power on the ground and took everyone by surprise,” the researcher argued.
The man he is now “the face of the devil”in the words of the Israeli army, has not appeared in public since October.
“He is the security man par excellence” who, with a “leader’s charisma”, takes “decisions with the utmost calm”Abou Abdallah, a former Hamas colleague who was detained, told AFP in 2017.
In 1987, the first Intifada, the uprising against Israeli occupation, broke out in a refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip. The young man, born in Khan Yunis, a camp in the south of the territory, joined the newly founded Hamas.
At the age of 25, he was already in charge of the Jihad and Preaching Organization, the Hamas intelligence unit that punishes ‘collaborators’, Palestinians punished for providing information to the Israeli enemy.
In 1988, he founded Majd, Hamas’s internal security service.
Imprisoned in 1989, he established himself as a leader of the prisoners. Sentenced to life imprisonment several times, he was released in 2011 along with a thousand detainees released by Israel, in exchange for soldier Gilad Shalit, a Hamas hostage for five years.
Yahya Sinwar saw Israel eliminate his mentors, namely Sheikh Ahmed Yassine, founder of Hamas, and Salah Chehadé, founder of the Ezzedine al-Qassam brigades, the armed wing of the movement, of which he is considered the right-hand man.
Placed on the US list of “international terrorists”was the target of multiple assassination attempts.
Elected leader of Hamas in Gaza in 2017, he led a strategy that is “radical in military terms and pragmatic in politics”, Seurat explained.
The Israeli media published excerpts from his interrogations, in which he describes having kidnapped a traitor and taken him to the Khan Younès cemetery: “I put him in a pit and strangled him with a keffiyeh [lenço palestiniano].”
At the political level, he advocates a united Palestinian leadership for all the occupied territories: the Gaza Strip, controlled by Hamas, the West Bank, administered by Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah, and East Jerusalem.
“He made it known that he would punish anyone who tried to prevent reconciliation with Fatah”recalled the European Council for Foreign Affairs (ECFR).
After his election as head of Hamas in Gaza, the movement accepted the principle of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, but maintained as its ultimate goal the “liberation” of the entire territory of Palestine in 1948, including present-day Israeli territory.
At all costs, he intends to force Israel and the world to take an interest in the fate of the Palestinians.
After the October attack, Israel declared war on the Gaza Strip to “eradicate” Hamas. The Israeli response has already caused nearly 40,000 deaths, according to the Hamas-controlled enclave’s health ministry.
Read Also: Israel calls for new Hamas leader to be ‘eliminated quickly’
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Source: https://www.noticiasaominuto.com/mundo/2611311/escapou-a-perpetuas-e-planeou-7-de-outubro-quem-e-o-novo-lider-do-hamas
