News Brief – Oct 18, 2024

Hamas confirmed on Friday that its leader, Yahya Sinwar, was killed while fighting Israeli forces in Gaza.

Netanyahu has already indicated that he won’t use Sinwar’s death as an opportunity to open negotiations with Hamas.

So the question is, will Sinwar’s death weaken Hamas’s resolve to continue to resist the Israeli invasion of Gaza?

To answer that question we only have to look at Israel’s ongoing conflict with Hezbollah. The Lebanese-based resistance movement’s leader was killed three weeks ago in an Israeli strike on a command bunker in Beirut.

Since then Hezbollah has intensified its missile and drone attacks on northern Israel. If anything Nasrallah’s assassination seems to have strengthened the movement’s resolve to continue resisting Israeli encroachments.

We wouldn’t be surprised if we saw something similar happen with Hamas. Sinwar may have founded the resistance group but he kept a relatively low profile.

It wasn’t Sinwar who catapulted Hamas to prominence after Oct. 7, 2023. It was the collective efforts of its fighters, individuals who were massively outgunned and outnumbered but who took on the IDF and thoroughly humiliated it.

Since then thousands of young Palestinians have joined the ranks of Hamas, drawn to organization by the efforts of its fighters in their struggle against the Israeli occupation.

Yahya Sinwar’s role in this was incidental. Sure, he’s now regarded as a martyr but many more young Arabs will now step forward to take up arms.

Israel’s assassinations won’t discourage them. In fact it may only encourage them.

“Anti-Semitism” is not what motivates opposition to Israeli occupation, as the Zionists claim. It’s the sheer brutality and savagery of the Zionist regime that’s helping to recruit new Hamas fighters.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Jewish supremacists regard all Palestinians as little more than subhuman.

Like Netanyahu and his Jewish supremacist allies, these are the people striving to destroy Gaza and this is what motivates young Palestinian men to volunteer and take up arms against them.

This will be Sinwar’s legacy.