Summer Said, Anat Peled, Rory Jones – Wall Street Journal Jan 13, 2025

Hamas suffered a severe blow last fall when Israel killed Yahya Sinwar, the group’s leader and strategist behind the Oct. 7 attacks.

But now the U.S.-designated terrorist group has another Sinwar in charge, Yahya’s younger brother Mohammed, and he is working to build the militant group back up.

Israel’s 15-month campaign has reduced Hamas’s Gaza Strip redoubt to rubble, killed thousands of its fighters and much of its leadership, and cut off the border crossings it might use to rearm. The well-trained and well-armed cadres who surged into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, are badly weakened.

But the violence has also created a new generation of willing recruits and littered Gaza with unexploded ordnance that Hamas fighters can refashion into improvised bombs. The militant group is using those tools to continue to inflict pain. The Israeli military in the past week has reported 10 deaths among soldiers in the area of Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza. Hamas also has fired some 20 rockets at Israel in the past two weeks.

The recruitment drive and persistent fighting under Sinwar pose a fresh challenge for Israel. Its military has battered the group in Gaza, but for months has had to return to areas it previously cleared of militants to take them on again in new fighting. That cycle points to the difficulty of ending a war that has exhausted Israel’s troops and continues to imperil hostages still held in Gaza.

“We are in a situation where the pace at which Hamas is rebuilding itself is higher than the pace that the IDF is eradicating them,” said Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli brigadier general, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. “Mohammed Sinwar is managing everything.”

Spokespeople for Hamas declined to comment.

Mohammed Sinwar is at the center of Hamas’s revival effort. When Israeli soldiers killed his brother in October, the movement’s officials, based in the Qatari capital, Doha, decided to form a collective leadership council rather than appoint a new chief.

But Hamas militants in Gaza didn’t go along and now operate autonomously under the younger Sinwar, according to Arab mediators involved in cease-fire talks with Israel.

Mohammed Sinwar

Unlike his brother, who spent more than two decades in an Israeli prison, Mohammed hasn’t spent a significant amount of time in Israeli jail and is less understood by Israel’s security establishment. He has operated largely behind the scenes, according to Arab officials, earning him the nickname “Shadow.”

“We are working hard to find him,” said a senior Israeli official from the Southern Command, which runs the battle in Gaza.

According to Israeli officials, Mohammed Sinwar was one of the people responsible for the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier in 2006 that eventually led to his brother’s release in a prisoner swap five years later.

With Yahya Sinwar, Deif and Deif’s deputy all dead, Mohammed Sinwar is now Hamas’s most senior commander in Gaza, along with Izz al-Din Haddad, the military head in northern Gaza, according to political analysts who study the militants.

Before the war, Israel believed that Hamas had up to 30,000 fighters arranged into 24 battalions in a structure that loosely resembled a state military. The Israeli military now says it has destroyed that organized structure and has killed about 17,000 fighters, and detained thousands of others.

Hamas, which Israeli and Arab officials say still controls large areas of the Gaza Strip, hasn’t said how many fighters it has lost. The number of new Hamas recruits also remains unclear.

The Israeli military says Hamas has recruited many hundreds of people in the past few months and that recruiting was happening across Gaza, with a focus on the north. Arab officials say they have been told by Israel the number could be in the thousands.

The new fighters, while inexperienced, are launching hit-and-run attacks in small cells of just a few fighters. They are using guns and antitank weapons that require little military training.

Hamas is recruiting the new fighters with promises of more food, aid and medical care for young men and their families, according to Arab officials, who say the militants sometimes steal humanitarian aid or co-opt civilians to work with the militant group.

The U.S. and international aid groups have long pressed Israel to allow more aid into the Gaza Strip, where residents have had to contend with hunger and high prices. Israel has said it admits lots of aid and has pointed to distribution problems by aid groups and looting by forces including Hamas as impediments to getting more of it to Palestinians.

Hamas militants are also targeting funerals and prayer gatherings to find aggrieved young Palestinians inclined to sign up, these officials said.

The recruiting drive is extending a war that was triggered by the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, which left around 1,200 people dead and about 250 taken hostage. About 400 Israeli soldiers have died fighting in Gaza. More than 46,000 people have been killed in Gaza during the war, according to Palestinian health authorities, who don’t say how many were combatants.

Israeli soldiers have spent months in a new fight with Hamas in northern Gaza. Demonstrating the numbers of militants still operating, the Israeli military earlier this month said it apprehended more than 240 fighters from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another militant group, in a single battle at a hospital in the area.

Videos posted online by Hamas’s armed wing show how it is currently fighting in northern Gaza. In a video from late last year, four fighters creep up on a tank and attach a device that causes the vehicle to explode. Another video shows a Hamas militant moving through the debris of a bombed-out building before launching a rocket-propelled grenade at a tank.

Once a bustling hub of Palestinian life, the Gaza Strip has been reduced to rubble, with most of the prewar population of more than two million squeezed into an encampment of tents and other makeshift housing along the beach.

Months of efforts to reach a cease-fire that would free many of the hostages still being held in Gaza have been fruitless, amid deep-seated disagreements over issues including Israel’s demand that it be able to continue the fight after a pause.

Mohammed Sinwar has proved as stubborn as his older sibling in pushing for a permanent cease-fire that ensures Hamas’s survival, according to Arab officials mediating the talks.

“Hamas is in a very strong position to dictate its terms,” Mohammed Sinwar wrote late last year in one message to mediators that was shared with The Wall Street Journal. He wrote in another message: “If it is not a comprehensive deal that ends the sufferings of all Gazans and justifies their blood and sacrifices, Hamas will continue its fight.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the fighting will continue until Hamas is destroyed.

Israel has blunted Hamas’s ability to smuggle weapons by carving security corridors into the strip and by taking control of the 9-mile-long border between Egypt and Gaza. But the group had a large arms stockpile before the war and continues to be able to fire rockets.

Israel’s difficulty in uprooting Hamas contrasts with its success in killing many of the group’s senior leaders, both in Gaza and abroad, and the beating back of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel forced Hezbollah to accede to a cease-fire there that has eased fighting, after the Iran-backed militia came to Hamas’s aid in the war by firing rockets into Israel almost daily.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew said on Jan. 10 that the U.S. has long thought it was a mistake to set the destruction of Hamas as the goal. The U.S. has pushed Israel to come up with a plan for governing the Gaza Strip after the war so that Hamas can be squeezed out.

Many in Israel’s security establishment agree. They want the government to introduce a new administration that could counter Hamas’s control over parts of the strip, with the Palestinian Authority viewed as the only realistic option.

Netanyahu has opposed a role for the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the occupied West Bank. Other players, such as Arab states, appear unwilling to take control of Gaza while Hamas remains a military threat. The Israeli prime minister’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

“Hamas had a major, major blow, but it’s still there,” said Yoel Guzansky at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies think tank. “They will recruit, rearm.”

Source https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/hamas-has-another-sinwar-and-he-s-rebuilding/ar-BB1rlhwn

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