Killing Hamas leader garners Israel a tactical, not a strategic success

 

Yahya Sinwar’s last moments: Source: Israel Defense Forces

By James M. Dorsey

 

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For the past year, Israel depicted Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar as a coward hiding in Gaza’s fortified underground tunnels shielded by 22 handcuffed Israeli hostages.

Drone footage of the Hamas leader’s last minutes released by the Israeli military showed a different Mr. Sinwar.

Dressed in military fatigues, badly wounded, and covered in dust in a ruined above-ground apartment after an exchange of fire with Israeli troops, Mr. Sinwar, seemingly alone, made one last gesture of defiance before he was killed.

More important than shining a light on apparent Israeli dis-and misinformation, the impact of the contrast in images suggests that Israel’s management of its information war is backfiring, much like its targeted assassinations that have failed to spark the collapse of groups like Hamas or Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite militia.

The backfiring of Israel’s failed information warfare strategy didn’t prevent its spokespeople from regurgitating assertions of corruption and Hamas leaders living a life of luxury while Gazans pay a horrendous price.

In the wake of Mr. Sinwar’s death, Israel’s Arabic language military spokesperson published a video showing the Hamas leader’s wife entering an underground tunnel with a handbag identified by the military as a US$32,000 Birkin product.

A second video purported to show Mr. Sinwar’s comfortable underground hideout furnished with food stocks, including a seemingly unopened United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) sack, weapons caches, and stacks of US dollars and Israeli shekels.

“He lives here in a good way with his millions, while the civilians above ground are living in poverty and are starving… We know he fled from here and left some of his millions behind,” an unidentified Israeli military guide says in the video.

Mr. Sinwar’s defiance and the debunking of, at least, some Israeli assertions have garnered him in death respect among Palestinians and Arabs, including critics who held him co-responsible for Gaza’s suffering in the past year and/or were long opposed to Hamas despite the Israeli effort to discredit him and stoke public anger.

“Even people who were angry about Hamas, when they saw. . . he had been killed during clashes and not hiding in a tunnel, as Israel was always claiming, they felt sorry and sad for him. Sinwar’s death will raise his popularity,” said Mohammed Sobeh, speaking to the Financial Times from Khan Younis in Gaza.

Long on Israel’s most wanted list, officials accused Mr. Sinwar of masterminding last year’s October 7 attack on Israel that sparked the Gaza war. Many Palestinians, including supporters of the attack, hold Mr. Sinwar co-responsible for prolonging Gaza’s agony by allegedly having complicated ceasefire negotiations.

On X, Ghanem Nuseibeh, the founder of a London-based strategy and management consultancy with close ties to the United Arab Emirates and a rare Arab campaigner against ant-Semitism, warned that Israel’s killing of Mr. Sinwar and the release of the footage was counterproductive.

“A very worrying trend is emerging in the Arabic cyberspace. Unlike, for example, when (Osama) Bin Laden was killed, Sinwar is getting a lot of positive publicity, almost a hero figure in Arabic circles… It doesn’t matter what I or the West or moderate Muslims say about Sinwar. What matters is the Arab street, and he has turned into a hero. Very worrying indeed,” Mr.  Nuseibeh said.

Mr. Nusseibeh’s warning should ring alarm bells in Jerusalem but is unlikely to do so.

Instead, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s policy bolsters Mr. Sinwar’s post-mortem popularity, which is fuelled by a generation of Gazans and Palestinians’ loss of hope because of Israel’s ultra-nationalism, devasting war on Gaza and stepped-up repression on the West Bank.

Motaz Azaiza on BBC Hardtalk

“What’s the need of rebuilding Gaza if the problem still exists, if I’m still under occupation?... Whenever I’m under occupation, and everything is restricted, this will never end, and no one will have safety, and no one will have peace whenever I don’t have peace as a Palestinian,” said photographer Motaz Azaiza.

Mr. Sinwar’s killing “only strengthens Hamas’ determination, tenacity, and resolve,” added Walid al-Hubali, a resident of Ramallah on the West Bank.

Harking back to Egypt’s failed attempt in the late 1940s to destroy the Muslim Brotherhood, Middle East analyst Steven A. Cook noted that “it is hard to kill your way out of the problem posed by a resistance movement. The committed do not get the message; they just redouble their efforts… Resistance, after all, is not futile. It is a critical component of identity.”

Mr. Cook suggested that “as proficient in avenging blood as the Israelis have become in their decades-long struggle with terrorism, they have never managed to bring an appreciable end to violent resistance.”

Beyond Palestinians’ despair and lack of prospects, Mr. Sinwar’s enhanced status in death spotlights the gap between autocratic Arab rulers’ attitudes towards Hamas, Palestinian aspirations, and Israel’s war conduct and public opinion in the Middle East.

Credit: Quds News Network

“Seventy per cent of my population is younger than me. For most of them, they never really knew much about the Palestinian issue. And so they’re being introduced to it for the first time through this conflict. It’s a huge problem.  Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don’t, but my people do,” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly told US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, according to The Atlantic.

Saudi officials said The Atlantic had quoted the crown prince inaccurately.

At the bottom line, Messrs. Bin Salman, Nuseibeh and Azaiza are telling Israel that efforts to bomb Palestinians into submission are failing, producing a generation that has nowhere to go and nothing to lose, and dashing Israeli hopes of regional acceptance, even if Gazans’ most immediate aspiration is to see an end to the war.

“Sinwar’s death is par for the course. Palestinians expected it, he expected it. Sinwar and others will inspire the next generation of resistance. It will come, but that is for later. Right now, all we want is an end to this war,” said a Gazan, who asked not to be identified.

Rather than sparking doom and gloom in Hamas’s ranks, Mr. Sinwar’s killing is likely to reinforce the group’s sense of success.

“Hamas has the upper hand. It has remained steadfast” and brought the Israeli military into “a state of attrition,” the group’s former leader, Khaled Meshal, told The New York Times in September.

In that vein, Hamas senior official Khalil al-Hayya, confirming Mr. Sinwar’s killing, suggested that the leader’s death would not weaken the group’s resolve to release Israeli hostages kidnapped a year ago only if Israel ends the war.

Credit: svt Nyheter

Messrs. Meshal and Al-Hayya are both touted as potential successors to Mr. Sinwar.

Senior Israeli military officials, including Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the military spokesman, have conceded that Mr. Netanyahu’s goal of destroying Hamas was unrealistic.

In August, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told a parliamentary committee that Mr. Netanyahu’s goal of “total victory” over Hamas was “nonsense.”

Retired Major General Gadi Shamni, a former commander of the Israeli military’s Gaza division and military secretary to Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert and Ariel Sharon, asserted that “Hamas is winning this war. Our soldiers are winning every tactical encounter with Hamas, but we’re losing the war,and in a big way.”

Mr. Shamni attributed Israel’s inability to translate tactical successes into strategic victories to Mr. Netanyahu’s failure to plan for a Gazan future involving Israeli withdrawals and a credible Palestinian administration of the territory.

Credit: Al Jazeera

The two-week-old siege of the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza is Exhibit A of Mr. Shamni’s assessment as are Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah’s escalating attacks on Israel and the group’s ability to slowdown Israel’s initial ground invasion of southern Lebanon.

The siege intends to dislodge Hamas, which, in the absence of credible Palestinian governance. reestablishes itself in the camp every time Israel withdraws.

The siege suggests that Mr. Netanyahu’s refusal to present a plan for credible interim governance and longer-term accommodation of Palestinian national aspirations is sucking Israel into a low-level guerrilla war or war of attrition with resistance fighters who have nothing to lose, are likely to sap Israel’s strength, and will complicate the Jewish state’s efforts to repair the reputational damage it has inflicted on itself.

“If Israel’s plan is to annex part of Gaza and impose military rule, how long before thousands of vengeful, angry young men who have watched their parents and siblings die join a reconstituted Hamas or a new movement that replaces it and takes up arms against Israel? And what of the reconstruction of Gaza, which now resembles a 25-mile-long Dresden? Who will reconstruct it, and who will foot the bill? asked international affairs scholar Rajan Menon.

“Sinwar is gone, but his departure will do nothing to help Israel overcome these challenges – which it must if the country hopes for an end to violent resistance in Gaza and anything resembling long-term peace,” Mr. Menon added.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.