2024-10-17 17:17:00
The Israeli army confirmed on Thursday 17 October the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinouar, considered one of the architects of the unprecedented attack carried out by the Palestinian Islamist movement on 7 October 2023 on Israeli soil. The army and national intelligence services “confirm that, after a year-long hunt, yesterday (Wednesday), 16 October 2024, soldiers of the Israeli army eliminated Yahya Sinouar, the leader of the terrorist organization Hamas during an operation in the southern Gaza Strip,” the army said in a statement.
Yahya Sinouar, a radical activist and man in the shadows, is considered one of the masterminds of the unprecedented attack carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023 on Israeli soil, which sparked the war on Palestinian territory and ignited dust in the region.
“The mass murderer Yahya Sinouar, responsible for the October 7 massacre and atrocities, has been eliminated by (Israeli forces) soldiers,” Katz said in a press statement. “During army operations in the Gaza Strip, three terrorists were eliminated,” the army said earlier in a statement, while an Israeli security source specified that DNA analysis was being carried out on one body to confirm whether it is really Sinouar. Israeli President Isaac Herzog says Yahya Sinouar is ‘responsible for heinous acts of terrorism’
61 years old and leader of the Palestinian Islamist movement in Gaza since 2017, he was appointed political leader of Hamas at the beginning of August after the death of Ismaïl Haniyeh, killed in Tehran on 31 July in an attack blamed on Israel, which has not commented. Hamas did not confirm.
Shortly after the October 7, 2023 attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared: “Every member of Hamas is a dead man.” Before Katz’s announcement, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant wrote in X: “We will reach every terrorist and eliminate him.”
The leader of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson hailed Yahya Sinouar’s death as a “source of hope”.
Explosive context
These declarations are part of an explosive context in the Middle East, where since 23 September Israel has been bombing Hezbollah positions in Lebanon, which on 8 October 2023 had opened a cross-border front in support of Hamas. On September 30, the Israeli army launched ground operations in southern Lebanon to fight the Lebanese Islamic movement.
At midday on Thursday, the attacks targeted several regions in southern and eastern Lebanon, Hezbollah strongholds, including the southern outskirts of Beirut. Earlier, an Israeli attack targeted Hezbollah’s “weapons warehouse” in Latakia in Syria, a stronghold of President Bashar al-Assad, wounding two people, according to Syrian media and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The United States, Israel’s allies, for their part announced that they had struck five underground ammunition depots of the Houthis, who control large areas of Yemen and carry out attacks against Israel and ships allegedly linked to it, in support of Hamas.
After weakening Hamas in Gaza, Israel moved the bulk of its military operations to the Lebanese front. In nearly a month, at least 1,373 people have been killed in the country, according to an AFP tally based on official data, while the UN has recorded nearly 700,000 people displaced.
Iran, an ally of the Syrian regime, Houthi rebels, Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas, threatened on Thursday to “painfully” attack Israel if it hit targets “in Iran or in the region”, in response to the missile attack carried out by Tehran on Israeli territory on October 1, to which Israel promised to respond. This attack was presented by Iran as retaliation for the assassination of Ismaïl Haniyeh and that of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, who was killed in an Israeli attack on September 27 near Beirut.
The head of Iranian diplomacy, Abbas Araghchi, met with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi in Cairo on Thursday. According to the Egyptian presidency, they discussed the “need to stop regional escalation” and reach a ceasefire in Lebanon and Gaza. Hezbollah for its part said Thursday that it had fired rockets at Israeli troops near the Israeli-annexed Syrian Golan Heights and destroyed two Israeli tanks in southern Lebanon.
Israel says it wants to neutralize Hezbollah on the border to allow the return to northern Israel of some 60,000 people displaced by continuous gunfire for a year.
Risk of famine in the Gaza Strip
In the Gaza Strip, at least 14 people were killed Thursday in an Israeli attack on the Abou Hussein school housing displaced people in Jabalia camp in the north, according to two hospitals in the area, with the Israeli army indicating it had taken targets Palestinian fighters.
Jabalia has been surrounded and bombed since October 6 by the Israeli army, which claims Hamas is trying to rebuild its forces there. The fate of hundreds of thousands of Gazans trapped in the fighting is at the center of international concern.
Some 345,000 Palestinians will face hunger at “catastrophic” levels this winter, compared to 133,000 currently, the UN warned in a report released Thursday. The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, has highlighted the “real risk” of famine in the besieged and devastated Palestinian territories, accusing “some members of the Israeli government” of manufacturing “a weapon of war” . .
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