Israel plans to eliminate Hamas leaders after they staged recent invasion
Hamas leader in Gaza is a 'dead' man» Israel's military said Monday as it embarked on a likely bloody campaign to kill key members of the extremist group following an unprecedented attack in southern Israel over the weekend.
The Israeli government has vowed to hunt down Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip following a surprise attack that which killed more than 700 Israelis.
Yahya Sinwar is the head of Hamas in Gaza, a densely populated coastal enclave home to more than two million Palestinians.
“Yahya Sinwar is the commander of the campaign and he is dead,” said Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, an Israel Defense Forces spokesman. . He said that «Hamas's military and political leadership and all its assets are under attack and are doomed.»
Sinwar, the highest-ranking Hamas official in Gaza, is the de facto ruler of the territory and the second most powerful Hamas member after Ismail Haniyeh. general leader of the group.
Yahya Sinwar was born in 1962 in the Khan Yunis refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip. He studied at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he graduated from the Faculty of Arabic Studies. First arrested while studying at university, he befriended Palestinian activists in prison and vowed to dedicate himself to the Palestinian cause.
By the mid-1980s, he headed Hamas' security department, where he was responsible for tracking down and punishing Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel. His willingness to execute suspected collaborators earned him the nickname the Butcher of Khan Younis.
He was arrested and jailed by the Israelis in 1988 on attempted murder charges, but was released in 2011 — he was one of more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners who were exchanged for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been held hostage by Hamas for five years. /p>
Sinwar is believed to be behind the torture and murder of Hamas commander Mahmoud Ishtiwi, who was accused of embezzlement and what Hamas called moral turpitude — code for homosexuality.
The Hamas Charter calls for the destruction of Israel, and Sinwar is known to oppose any attempt to compromise or mediate with the Jewish state. He still lives in Khan Yunis, his birthplace. Israeli jets bombed his home over the weekend, but Hamas insists there were no casualties in the attack.
Israelis will find it difficult to target top Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who lives outside the Gaza Strip in Qatar. Footage has emerged of Haniyeh celebrating the attack with other Hamas officials in his office in Doha, the Qatari capital.
He called the offensive «Operation Al-Aqsa Flood» and over the weekend vowed to continue the «battle to liberate our land and our prisoners languishing in occupation prisons.»
He also said armed Palestinian factions intend to spread the fighting to the West Bank and Jerusalem. After surviving at least one assassination attempt by Israel, he fled Gaza around 2016 and moved to Qatar.
Next on Israel's list of Hamas figures to be eliminated is Mohammed Deif, the one-eyed and elusive head of Hamas' military wing, the Qassam Brigades.
He announced over the weekend that the surprise attack was a response to the 16-year blockade of Gaza, the Israeli occupation and a series of recent incidents that have brought Israeli-Palestinian tensions to a fever pitch, starting with settlement construction in the occupied West Bank. to clashes at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Praised by many Palestinians for his resistance to the Israelis, he survived repeated assassination attempts by Israel.
Deif is said to have masterminded the weekend invasion, which saw up to 1,000 Hamas fighters pour across the Gaza Strip's border with southern Israel. It has been fighting the Israelis for decades and is responsible for a wave of suicide bombings that have killed dozens of Israelis. He gradually rose in the ranks of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas.
20 years ago he was nearly killed in an airstrike that cost him one arm and a leg. As a result of another attack, he lost an eye. In 2014, as a result of another Israeli airstrike, his wife and little son were killed.
He is credited with developing Hamas' signature weapon, the Qassam rockets, thousands of which were fired at Israel. He is also reported to be behind the digging of many tunnels under the Gaza Strip.
His alias Deif means «guest» in Arabic, indicating his habit of spending each night at a different site set up by sympathizers to try evade Israeli surveillance and air strikes.
Deif is single-minded in his intention to destroy the state of Israel.
“Deif was trying to start a second war of Israeli independence,” Eyal Rosen, a colonel in the Israeli army reserve with intimate knowledge of the Gaza Strip, told the FT. “The main goal is to gradually destroy Israel. This is one of the first steps, this is just the beginning.”
Also high on Israel's killing list will be Abu Obeida, a spokesman for the military wing of Hamas. It was Obeida who claimed that Hamas was holding dozens of Israeli soldiers captive in «safe spots» and tunnels in the Gaza Strip.
If confirmed, it could pave the way for complex and likely lengthy negotiations to exchange them for some of the thousands of Palestinians whom Israel holds in its prisons.
The Israelis will also seek to hunt down and kill Ziyad al-Nahala, the leader of Islamic Jihad. It is a separate group from Hamas but joined the devastating attack from the Gaza Strip and reportedly took about 30 hostages.
An-Nahale, who usually lives in Beirut, said in a televised statement on Sunday evening that the hostages will not be released until all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons are released.
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