Hamas on Tuesday announced Yahya Sinwar as the militant group’s new political chief following the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh.
Haniyeh was killed last week when an airstrike hit his residence in Tehran, where the Hamas leader had attended Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s inauguration ceremony. Israel was blamed for the attack that also killed Haniyeh’s bodyguard.
“Hamas announces the selection of brother leader Yahya Sinwar as head of the movement’s political office, succeeding the late leader Ismail Haniyeh, may God have mercy on him,” the group said in a statement Tuesday.
Israel Defense Forces spokesman Avichay Adraee criticized the decision to install Sinwar, the man Israel accuses of being the architect of the October 7 attack on Israel.
“There is only one place reserved for Yahya Sinwar and that is alongside Mohammed Al-Deif, Marwan Issa and the rest of the Hamas ISIS members responsible for the October 7th massacre that we killed,” Adraee said in X.
Foreign Minister Israel Katz called Sinwar an “arch-assassin” and said his appointment “is another reason to bring about its speedy elimination and erase the memory of this organization from the face of the earth.”
Sinwar, the Hamas leader in charge of day-to-day governance in Gaza before Oct. 7, is believed to be hiding in the labyrinth of tunnels used by Hamas militants in Gaza to hide weapons, fighters and hostages, Israeli officials said. he said.
The elusive leader was reportedly last seen in a 42-second clip filmed three days after the attack that showed 61-year-old Sinwar and his family fleeing into a tunnel in southern Gaza, according to the IDF.
“The hunt will not stop until we capture him, dead or alive,” Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, an IDF spokesman, said in a televised statement in February.
Born in a Gaza refugee camp in the early 1960s, Sinwar joined Hamas after it was founded in 1987, earning a reputation for brutality after allegedly helping to form the militant group’s internal security force, according to a profile of him made by European Council on Foreign Relationsa reflection group.
In 1988, he was sentenced to life in prison for planning the murder of two Israeli soldiers, as well as the murder of four Palestinians he suspected of collaborating with Israel. He was released in 2011 as one of more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners released in exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier detained by Hamas for more than five years.
After his release, Sinwar quickly rose through the ranks of Hamas and was elected to become the group’s leader in a secret ballot in 2017. Upon taking power, Sinwar attempted to improve relations with Egypt and Fatah, the secular Palestinian political party. which partially runs the occupied West Bank and rivals Hamas in Gaza, according to the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Sinwar has been in hiding since Oct. 7, when Hamas militants attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 240 hostages, according to Israeli records. Since then, Israel has declared war on Gaza and killed more than 40,000 people in the enclave, according to local authorities.
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