Hamas has appointed Yahya Sinwar as its new commander-in-chief, replacing Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in Tehran last week.
Sinwar has been the group’s leader in Gaza since 2017. He will now become the leader of his political faction.
Sinwar is believed to remain in the Gaza Strip, but his current whereabouts are unknown.
The news comes amid rising tensions in the Middle East, with Iran and its allies threatening retaliation for Haniyeh’s killing, which they blame on Israel. Israel has yet to comment.
Hamas issued a statement saying, “The Islamic resistance movement Hamas announced the election of leader Yahya Sinwar as chairman of the movement’s political bureau.”
Sinwar is currently at the top of Israel’s most wanted list. Israeli security agencies believe he planned and carried out the attack on October 7, 2023, which killed more than 1,200 people and took 251 people back to Gaza as hostages.
Hamas has not released the details of how Sinwar will lead the organization’s politburo.
The 61-year-old has not been seen in public since the October attacks and is believed to be hiding “on the 10th floor underground” in Gaza, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in June.
In the late 1980s, Sinwar established a Hamas security wing called Majd, one of whose targets were Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel.
Sinwar spent most of his life in Israeli prisons and was sentenced to four life sentences after his third arrest in 1988.
However, he was one of 1,027 Palestinian and Israeli Arab prisoners released by Israel in 2011 in exchange for an Israeli soldier who had been imprisoned by Hamas for more than five years.
He later returned to a key leadership role in Hamas and in 2017 was appointed head of the organization’s Gaza political bureau.
The United States placed Sinwar on its “international terrorist” blacklist.
