Hamas’ crossroads after Sinwar’s death. international

Eight-year-old Saeed leans on his father’s shoulders, wearing fake Ray Ban sunglasses and holding with both hands a paper bearing the image of Yahia Sinwar, the Hamas leader killed by Israeli troops in Gaza. Around it are a dozen Palestinian flags and a Lebanese flag. There is no single characteristic of green that represents Hamas, although slogans in favor of its leaders are openly raised, especially in favor of those who have been exterminated by the Jewish state. After last Friday’s prayers, only about thirty people marched through the center of Ramallah, the administrative capital of the occupied West Bank. This weekly demonstration is “for peace”, explains Hamza Osama, 40, and Saeed’s father. About twenty uniformed agents and a few in plain clothes observe the scene.

A day earlier, Israel announced that it had collected the most sought-after piece in the strip from the person it believes to be the originator of the attack on October 7, 2023, the trigger of the current war. However, the pace of bombing and military incursions continues, in an area where more than 42,500 people have been killed and where 101 hostages are still held. This Saturday, Israeli planes dropped leaflets on the Strip bearing the photo of Sinwar’s body and the words: “Hamas will no longer rule Gaza.”

The Islamist leader was promoted to the leadership of the movement in the first week of August after his predecessor Ismail Haniya was assassinated in an attack in Tehran on July 31 and Israel was credited with the assassination. After the party’s top political official Jalil Khaya confirmed Sinwar’s death from exile on Friday, the pools are open about this new forced replacement at the top. He himself comes forward as one of the possible successors, although the future does not depend solely on leadership.

For the first time since the conflict began on October 7, 2023, polls in Gaza and the West Bank last month showed a “significant” decline in support for the Hamas-led attack that killed nearly 1,200 people in Israel that day. Expectations that the group will emerge victorious from the war have also declined, according to a survey conducted between 3 and 7 September by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR). Similarly, support for this Islamist movement has declined to “moderate”, despite the fact that it is ahead of other Palestinian formations in voting intention. The option of armed conflict is also losing support compared to a negotiated solution to ending the Israeli occupation.

The atmosphere in Ramallah today is very different from that established in the first months of the war, with proud supporters visible on every corner. Then, an outbreak of violence boosted Hamas in elections in the West Bank, a region where its doctrine traditionally has less influence than in Gaza, where the group was founded in 1987. ”For the Palestinians, there must be learned before everything, that there should be no armed conflict now as part of its liberation strategy,” says Gershon Baskin, a peace activist who came to Israel half a century before the United States Arrived and who advocates solutions different from those of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas, in a reflection written this Saturday.

Faris Sarafandi, the West Bank correspondent for Iranian television channel Al Alam and a prisoner in Israeli prisons between 1996 and 1999 as a member of Hamas during his student years, says, “Every Hamas leader knows and accepts that his end is death. Is.” Now there appear to be different reasons for the decline in the public presence of that movement. On the one hand, “anyone who goes out to protest is suspected by Israeli or Palestinian agents of being from Hamas and has a good chance of being arrested”. On the other hand, a large number of Hamas elements and their officials are in prisons in the Jewish state. Despite everything, Sarafandi, 48, believes that if elections were held in the West Bank, Islamists would win “massively”, although not in Gaza. There, he estimates, the circumstances of the war and the movement’s years in power, nearly two decades, do not help.

Could the absence of Sinwar and other leaders, coupled with war fatigue, bring about change in the so-called Islamic resistance movement? On the other end of the phone, Jose Vericat, a lead researcher at the Elcano Royal Institute, understands that there are ideas afoot to turn this into a more regional movement, thinking more about human rights. “It is likely” that this will happen because there is a part of the Palestinian and international community that politically agrees to “accommodate, recognize and assimilate” the Islamist current, although the current situation “is not helping the liberals,” Vericat says, he lived in Gaza for almost two years and knows the ins and outs of Hamas and the various Palestinian factions well.

Unlike places like Sana’a (Yemen), where thousands of people took to the streets to honor Sinwar, many encouraged by Iran and Hamas-affiliated Houthi guerrillas, there have been no mass demonstrations following his death in the Palestinian territories. Faced with this obvious popular discontent towards the Islamic resistance movement on the streets of Ramallah, it is enough to dig around that city on Friday and ask the protesters to confirm the reality. Many of those interviewed openly defended the group’s principles and glorified the dead leader, while acknowledging that the influence of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) on the group’s followers had tightened in recent months. Is. They also confirm that the police and secret services, in addition to making arrests, also have objectives Back The arrests are being made by Israeli agents. In the West Bank alone, the number of people detained by Jewish state authorities last year was approximately 10,000 and there were more than 700 deaths, according to local NGOs. Of the 10,000 detainees, 75% will be Hamas members or sympathizers.

The Palestinian journalist assesses that the ANP and Israel maintain signed cooperation agreements “which are not viewed well on the street”. “We don’t live in Europe. This is the Middle East and governments don’t accept opponents,” he says, smiling, because “they face death or jail.” He did not meet Sinwar in person during his three years in jail, but He witnessed the widespread influence he had on the movement from those around him.

“Israel believes that killing him will open the door to a less radical government, but it is wrong. Whoever comes will be equally radical,” says Sarafandi, who highly values ​​the group’s leadership that is used from Israeli prisons. In this sense, he understands that it will not take long to announce a new leader, who believes that, more than prison or Gaza, he will stay outside and have a more political than military profile. Therefore, he explains, it may have been Jalil Khaya. He added, “Choosing Sinwar within the Strip in August was an emotional gesture, a necessity.”

Verikat believes that the head of Hamas had already been living “on death row” for months and did not have “effective control over the movement”. In any case, consider that the photographs of his body and the video taken shortly before his death, in which he appears already injured and trying to defend himself with a stick, go against those who have spread “those mythical images” of “resistance”. “Total” for Israel.

Sinwar died without achieving the “great victory” that would have meant the release of the group’s prisoners – thousands are in Israeli prisons, where he spent more than two decades – and “returned to its origins” as an organization. Which today is “very hierarchical” and institutionalized.” Well, on the inside, he called it “a big move” to enter the electoral game, take over the strip’s government, and distance itself from the “resistance movement.” Considered as “trap”.

A leader dies, a myth is born

Activist Gershon Baskin has held secret talks with some of its leaders and secured the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011, securing the release of more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners, including Sinwar. He estimates that “Israel has killed thousands of innocent Palestinians” and “both sides have committed war crimes,” but that “nonviolent political Islam is legitimate” and “Israel needs to understand that there is no military solution.”

The “myth” created with the spread of Sinwar’s death, reflects José Vericat, “confirms the idea that Hamas will survive because it transcends the individual. It is an idea and represents very basic values. The former dogged resistance to occupation in the face of the impossibility of achieving Palestinian self-rule that Israel is going to try, now that it has finished, to get back the 101 hostages kidnapped on October 7, 2023. May try to buy hostages, although he believes this is “almost science fiction.”

As for Hamza Osama, who claims the Israelis took his land from him, “Sinwar has been killed by the Israeli occupation, but it will not end his leadership,” he explains, caressing the head of his son, whom he Keeps with himself. Looks at the picture of the leader who died this week. When asked about the little boy, he concluded that “It started 75 years ago, long before Yahiya Sinwar, and there have been thousands and thousands of deaths.” Ahlan Sheikh, a 50-year-old woman demonstrating in Ramallah, repeats several times, “Each of us is a Palestinian Sinwar.”