This is a staging post in the conflict, but it is only likely to make it more violent and intense
October 17, 2024 7:15 pm(Updated 7:16 pm)
The killing by Israeli troops in Gaza of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar will be greeted by Israelis as a sign that they are well on their way to a decisive victory over Hamas. It will be seen by the Palestinians as a further sign that they are facing a catastrophe as great as 1948, when they were expelled or fleed from a triumphant Israel.
For Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu the death of Sinwar, the architect of the devastating attack on Israel on 7 October, will be a moment of triumph, restoring Israel’s sense of total military superiority. Sinwar appears to have been killed by a chance raid by Israel troops in south Gaza.
What his death will not do is end the fighting in Gaza a year after the Israeli invasion. It is, in any case, unclear how far Sinwar – or any other Hamas leader – has any direct operational control over its irregular forces that continue to fight among the ruins. Israel justifies the appalling toll of Palestinian civilian casualties by claiming that its airstrikes on schools, hospitals, tented encampments and anywhere else are directed at Hamas “commanders” or “command and control centres”.
If this were true, then it would imply that Hamas is still an organised military force everywhere in the Gaza Strip. More likely, however, Hamas is militarily fragmented, though still capable of carrying out sporadic guerrilla attacks. Given the unrelenting Israeli bombardment that has killed 42,000 Palestinians, Hamas will have no difficulty in recruiting new fighters.
The crucial question now is how far the death of Sinwar will be one more “mission accomplished” moment in the Middle East, as when the US captured Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003 or Israel assassinated the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last month.
Israel has a long tradition of assassinating Palestinian leaders, going back long before Hamas was founded by Islamic scholar Ahmed Yassin in 1987. Yassin was assassinated by Israel in Gaza in 2004, but this did not stop Hamas taking over the Palestinian enclave in 2007.
How far did Sinwar achieve any of his aims by launching the 7 October attack? It certainly succeeded in putting the Palestinians back at the top of the international agenda, after years in which they had been marginalised.
Where Sinwar’s plan most likely went wrong – as did almost everybody else – was in believing that the US would intervene to restrain Israel after some weeks or months of fighting. This is what had happened in past Israel incursions into Gaza, but this time Israel had the unconditional support of the US. Despite pleas from US president Joe Biden for a ceasefire, the Gaza conflict has escalated into a regional war.
Israel estimates that it has destroyed Hamas as an organised military force and killed more than 18,000 Hamas fighters. Yet the real question now is political rather than military, as has always been the case. Hamas was able to catch the Israeli armed forces by surprise on 7 October, but its military capacity was always limited and its resistance partly symbolic.
Yet as long as that goes on Israel has not really solved its problem, which is the presence of five million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as a further two million in Israel itself.
Of course, there are those within the Israeli cabinet who have always held that the way to overcome this difficulty is by the expulsion or total subjugation of the Palestinians. For long it was assumed that the US would not allow this to happen, but this can no longer be taken for granted.
Though its appeals for Israeli restraint have been routinely ignored by Netanyahu, the Biden administration has invariably supported its acts of escalation retrospectively.
The death of Sinwar is an important staging post in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, but one that is only likely to make it more violent and intense.
