“We must give the opportunity to revive the resistance in the West Bank,” announced the Hamas leader, criticizing the management of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, about whom almost no one speaks anymore in this war.
I found this information in Sandra Cohen’s article, published in Globo three days after the Hamas attack, while researching who on the Palestinian side was the counterpart to the oftquoted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s worst enemy.
I was surprised that the name of the main leader of Hamas was not found in the news about the war, even though the names of several other leaders that Israel killed during the conflicts had already been published. I even wondered how many leaders Hamas would have.
A war usually doesn’t start by chance. There are always past reasons that motivate the first attack. Yahya Ibrahim Hassan Sinwar, 61, was born in a refugee camp in Kan Yuinis when it was under Egyptian rule, and in 1948 the family moved to the Gaza Strip.
Sinwar took over in February 2017 from Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas political leader now based in Qatar. The following month, he set up a Gaza Management Committee and rejected any powersharing with the Palestinian Authority. He was one of the founders of Hamas’ security apparatus and is the second most powerful figure in the terrorist organization’s hierarchy.
The Hamas commander in Gaza previously spent 23 years in Israeli prisons and was sentenced to four life sentences in 1989 for the deaths of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians who were considered Israeli spies.