Said, eight years old, shouts on his father’s shoulders while wearing fake Ray Ban sunglasses and holding up a sheet of paper with the image of Yahia Sinwar, Hamas leader killed by Israeli soldiers on Wednesday in Gaza. Around it, a dozen Palestinian flags and one from Lebanon. Not a single one of characteristic green representing Hamasalthough slogans are openly raised in favor of their leaders, especially those who have been liquidated by the Jewish State. Only about thirty people march through the center of Ramallah, the administrative capital of the occupied West Bank, after last Friday’s prayer. It is the weekly demonstration “for peace,” explains Hamza Osama, 40 years old and Said’s father. Around twenty uniformed agents and some in plainclothes observe the scene.
The day before, Israel announced that it had collected the most sought after piece on the Stripthe man he considered a promoter of October 7, 2023 attackthe trigger for the current war. The pace of bombings and military raids remains, however, above a territory where more than 42,500 people have died and where 101 hostages still remain. This Saturday, Israeli planes dropped pamphlets over the Strip with a photo of Sinwar’s body and which read: “Hamas will no longer govern Gaza.”
The Islamist leader had been elevated to the leadership of the movement in the first week of August, after the assassination of his predecessor, Ismail Haniyaon July 31 in an alleged attack that occurred in Tehran and was attributed to Israel. The pools are open regarding this new forcible replacement at the top, after the party’s top political official, Jalil Khaya, confirmed on Friday, from exile, the death of Sinwar. He himself appears as one of the possible successors, although the future does not depend only on leadership.
For the first time during the conflict that began on October 7, 2023polls in Gaza and the West Bank last month showed a “significant” drop in support for the Hamas-led attack, which killed some 1,200 people in Israel that day. There is also a decline in expectations that this group will emerge victorious from the war, according to a survey carried out between September 3 and 7 by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR, in its acronym in English). ). Likewise, there is a “moderate” decrease in support for this Islamist movement, despite the fact that it remains ahead of other Palestinian formations in voting intention. The option of armed struggle is also losing support compared to a negotiated solution to end 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. So, The outbreak of violence boosted Hamas in the polls in the West Banka territory in which its doctrine traditionally has less impact than in Gaza, where the group was founded in 1987. “For the Palestinians, the lessons learned must be, above all, that there should no longer be an armed struggle as part of their strategy of liberation,” says Gershon Baskin, a peace activist who arrived in Israel half a century ago from the United States and who advocates for solutions different from those of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas, in a reflection written this Saturday.
“Every Hamas leader knows and accepts that his end is death,” says Faris Sarafandi, West Bank correspondent for the Iranian television channel Al Alam and former prisoner in Israeli prisons between 1996 and 1999 as a member of Hamas in his student years, who He sees different reasons for the decline now in the public presence of that movement. On the one hand, “anyone who goes out to protest is suspected of being from Hamas and has a good chance of being arrested” by Israelis or Palestinian agents. 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 the Islamists would win “massively” if there were elections in the West Bank, although not in Gaza. There, esteem, The circumstances of the war and the years in power of the movement, almost two decades, do not help.
Can the absence of Sinwar and other leaders, along with war weariness, spur change within the so-called Islamic Resistance Movement? There are ideas floating around to turn it into a more territorial movement, more about human rights, understands José Vericat, principal researcher at the Elcano Royal Institute, on the other end of the phone. “There is a possibility” that this will happen because there are Palestinians and part of the international community who agree to politically “accommodate, recognize and assimilate” the Islamist current, although the current situation “is not helping the moderates,” maintains Vericat, who He lived in Gaza for almost two years and knows well the ins and outs of Hamas and the different Palestinian factions.
Unlike places like Sanaa (Yemen), where thousands of people honored Sinwar in the streets, many driven by the Houthi guerrilla allied with Iran and Hamasno mass demonstrations have been held after his death in Palestinian territory. Faced with this apparent popular disaffection of the Islamic Resistance Movement in the streets of Ramallah, it is enough to scratch a little and ask the protesters in that city on Friday to verify the reality. Several of those interviewed openly defend the group’s postulates and glorify the dead leader, while recognizing that the influence of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) has tightened in recent months on the group’s followers. They even affirm that the police and secret services, in addition to carrying out arrests, indicate objectives so that a posteriori there are arrests by Israeli agents. In the West Bank alone, those detained by authorities of the Jewish State in the last year amount to about 10,000 and the deaths to more than 700, according to local NGOs. 75% of the 10,000 detainees would be members or sympathizers of Hamas.
The ANP and Israel maintain signed collaboration agreements “that are not well seen” on the street, the Palestinian journalist assesses. “We don’t live in Europe. This is the Middle East and governments do not accept opponents,” he adds with a smile, because “they face death or prison.” He did not meet Sinwar personally during his three years in prison, but he did see with those around him his enormous influence on the movement.
“Israel believes that killing him will open the door to a less radical government, but it is wrong. Each one who comes will be equally radical,” adds Sarafandi, who attaches enormous importance to the leadership of the group that is exercised from Israeli prisons. In this sense, he understands that it will not take long to announce the new leader, who believes that, more than in prison or in Gaza, he will be outside and will have more of a political than a military profile. Therefore, he points out, it could be Jalil Khaya. “Choosing Sinwar in August within the Strip was an emotional gesture, a necessity then,” he adds.
The head of Hamas, Vericat understands, had already months living “on death row” and without having “effective control of movement”. Consider, in any case, that both the photos of his body and the video shortly before he died in which he is seen already wounded trying to defend himself with a stick have turned against those who have spread “those mythical images” of “resistance.” total” to Israel.
Sinwar has died without achieving the “great victory” that would have meant the release of the group’s prisoners – there are thousands in Israeli prisons where he spent more than two decades – and “returning to its origins” an organization that is today “too hierarchical and institutionalized.” Well, deep down, he considered it “a big trap” to have entered the electoral game, occupying the Government of the Strip and distancing himself from the “resistance movement.”
A leader dies, a myth is born
The activist Gershon Baskin has held secret negotiations with some of its leaders and achieved release agreements such as that of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011, exchanged for more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners, including Sinwar himself. He estimates that “Israel has killed tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians” and “both sides have committed war crimes,” but “nonviolent political Islam is legitimate” and “Israelis have to understand that there is no military solution.”
The “myth created” with the dissemination of Sinwar’s death, reflects José Vericat, “reaffirms the idea that Hamas will survive because it goes beyond the individual. It is an idea and represents very basic values that are resistance to the occupation in the face of the impossibility of achieving Palestinian self-government.” The expert adds that Israel is going to try, now that it has eliminated him, to recover the 101 hostages kidnapped on October 7, 2023 and he may try to do so by buying the captors, although he believes that this is “almost science fiction.”
For Hamza Osama, who claims that the Israelis have taken his land from him, “Sinwar has been killed by the Israeli occupation, but that will not end his leadership,” he explains while caressing the head of his son, whom he holds while he watches the portrait of the leader who died this week. When asked about the little boy, he concludes that “this started 75 years ago, long before Yahia Sinwar, and there are thousands and thousands of deaths.” “Each of us Palestinians are Sinwar,” Ahlan Sheik, a 50-year-old woman who also demonstrates in Ramallah, repeats several times.
