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By killing Sinwar, Israel has decapitated Hamas but the war will go on

The killing of Yahya Sinwar is likely to be claimed as a significant success by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has at times seemed desperate for any kind of victory.

Sinwar has been held responsible for the Hamas attacks of 7 October, and he led the group’s local organisation in Gaza before becoming its top leader following the assassination of his predecessor, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran.

There is speculation as to whether the killing of Sinwar will pave the way for ending the war in Gaza. The war can end if Israel agrees to the terms of ceasefire proposed by US President Biden, but if Netanyahu insists on destroying Hamas and liberating the hostages without offering anything in exchange, it is highly unlikely that we are near to an end of the fighting – or the return of the remaining hostages.

As for the longer Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even if this war comes to an end, the region will not remain quiet for long if Palestinians continue to be denied their basic rights and the Israeli occupation continues.

For Hamas, this marks the latest in a series of major blows within a few months, but it is highly unlikely to affect the group’s long-term strategy. Israel has succeeded many times before in almost decapitating Hamas, but has not managed to crush it.

The list of leaders eliminated since the emergence of Hamas on the Palestinian scene in the late 1980s includes: Imad Aqil in 1993; Yahya Ayyash in 1996; Jamal Salim and Jamal Mansur in 2001; Salah Shihadah in 2002; Sheikh Ahmad Yassin in 2004; Ahmad al-Jaabari in 2012; and more recently Salih al-Aruri on 2 January and Ismail Haniyeh on 31 July.

Hamas’s resilience derives from two factors. First, it stands for an idea, and the idea is that the Palestinians once had a homeland that was taken away from them to make way for the creation of a Jewish homeland.

The birth of Hamas in December 1987 was not just a consequence of the Palestinian intifada (uprising) that erupted one day before the movement’s birth, but also of the decision by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) leadership under Yassir Arafat to renounce armed resistance in favour of a peace process with Israel.

With passage of time, as the fruits of that process failed to materialise, the PLO lost its representative status in the minds of most Palestinians.

The 1993 Oslo Agreements between the PLO and Israel only turned the former into a collaborative agency working for the latter. The Palestinians have seen more of their lands confiscated, more of their houses demolished and more of their sons and daughters killed, maimed or detained by the Israelis.

The promised Palestinian state never saw the light of day and the two-state solution turned into a mirage as Israeli settlements devoured much of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The second factor is that Hamas is an institutional movement with an elected leadership. It has no personality cult and leaders who perish are immediately and smoothly replaced.

It remains to be seen who is likely to succeed Sinwar. Perhaps this time it is more likely to be someone in the diaspora. And it is possible that the movement will decide to live for the timebeing with a deputy leader until the elections are held. It is unlikely that elections will be held until the war is over as the flames of the conflict extend beyond Gaza across the region.

Finally, despite the loss, martyrdom has always been a powerful recruitment tool. In the Palestinian, as in the Islamic, culture, martyrdom is not a loss but a gain. Sinwar, like all his predecessors who were assassinated by Israel, will be celebrated by many people as a great martyr who perished fighting invaders.

Dr Azzam Tamimi is a British-Palestinian academic and historian, and author of ‘Hamas Unwritten Chapters’

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