Hamas announces Yahya Sinwar as new political head following Ismail Haniyeh assassination

Hamas on Tuesday announced Yahya Sinwar as the militant group’s new political head following the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh.

Haniyeh was killed last week when an airstrike hit his residence in Tehran, where the Hamas leader had participated in the inauguration ceremony of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Israel has been blamed for the strike that also killed Haniyeh’s bodyguard.

“Hamas announces the selection of brother leader Yahya Sinwar as head of the movement’s political bureau, succeeding the late leader Ismail Haniyeh, may God have mercy on him,” the group said in a statement Tuesday.

Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Avichay Adraee blasted the decision to install Sinwar, the man Israel accuses of being the architect of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

“There is only one place reserved for Yahya Sinwar and that is next to Mohammed Al-Deif, Marwan Issa, and the rest of the Hamas ISIS members responsible for the October 7 massacre whom we killed,” Adraee said on X.

Foreign Minister Israel Katz called Sinwar an “arch-murderer” and said his appointment “is another reason to bring about his quick elimination and erasing the memory of this organization from the face of the earth.”

Sinwar, the Hamas leader in charge of the day-to-day governance in Gaza prior to Oct. 7, is believed to be hiding in the labyrinth of tunnels used by Hamas militants in Gaza to conceal weapons, fighters and hostages, Israeli officials have said.

The elusive leader was allegedly 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 Adm. 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, gaining a reputation for brutality after he reportedly helped to form the militant group’s internal security force, according a profile of him by the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank.

In 1988 he was sentenced to life in prison for planning to kill two Israeli soldiers as well as the killing of four Palestinians he suspected of collaborating with Israel. He was released in 2011 as one of more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners freed in exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held by Hamas for more than five years.

After his release, Sinwar rose quickly through the ranks of Hamas and was elected to become the group’s leader in a secret ballot in 2017. On taking over, Sinwar attempted to improve relations with Egypt and Fatah, the secular Palestinian political party that 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 around 240 hostage, according to Israeli tallies. Israel has since declared war in Gaza and has killed over 40,000 people in the enclave, according to officials there.