The Israeli Prime Minister said on Wednesday (6) that Israeli forces surrounded the house of Yahya Sinwar potentially getting closer to the top Hamas official in Gaza – and the man most wanted by Israeli authorities.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said Sinwar was not in the house and that he is believed to be hiding underground in Gaza, but a senior adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that it was “just a matter of time until he is caught.”
Israel has publicly accused Sinwar of being the “mastermind” behind the Hamas terrorist attack against Israel on October 7 – although experts say he is probably one of several – making him a key target of its war in Gaza.
A long-time figure in the Palestinian Islamist group, Sinwar was responsible for building Hamas’ military wing before forming important new ties with regional Arab powers as the group’s civilian and political leader.
He was elected to Hamas’s main decision-making body, the Politburo, in 2017, as Hamas’s political leader in Gaza. However, he has since become the de facto leader of the Politburo, according to research by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).
He has been designated a global terrorist by the US State Department since 2015 and has recently been sanctioned by the United Kingdom and France.
Harel Chorev, a senior fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, said that while Sinwar is a key player within Hamas, he should not be seen as its only leader.
“He is seen as the most senior because he has a very high public profile, but Hamas does not work that way,” he said. “Hamas is a decentralized organization with several separate centers of power and he is one of them.”
Chorev said that although Sinwar is a prominent figure, he is part of a “triumvirate” of Hamas officials responsible for the October 7 attack, along with Mohammed al-Masri, popularly known as Mohammed Deif, commander of the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, and Deif’s deputy, Marwan Issa.
Sinwar is by far the best known and most recognizable of the three, but it was Deif who announced the October 7th attacks.
But while Sinwar has spent the last few years giving speeches and being photographed, Deif is an extremely secretive figure who is not seen in public.
PHOTOS: See images of the conflict between Israel and Hamas
Source: CNN Brasil
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