Where Is Sinwar Hiding? Report: Just Two or Three People Know The terror leader is still hoping for a Middle East in flames. P. David Hornik
A report on Israel’s ynet (Hebrew)—drawing on a report in Asharq al-Awsat, an Arabic newspaper published in London—cites Hamas members both inside and outside Gaza who say the organization’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, is updated all the time on the ongoing Gaza war.
“[Sinwar’s] ability to stay hidden, alongside Israel’s inability to reach him, does not mean he lacks communication with [other Hamas leaders]”—including those outside of Gaza, primarily in Qatar.
Sinwar “remains updated especially on the negotiations [for a hostage deal], and looks into every initiative, ponders it, and gives his judgment.”
The Hamas members further told the paper that only “a very small circle knows [Sinwar’s] location. No more than two or three people who provide for his needs and handle his communication with other [Hamas] leaders.”
Is it true, as widely speculated, that Sinwar has surrounded himself with Israeli hostages to keep himself safe? Is Israel’s failure to reach him due to concerns about those hostages, or to the fact that the Israeli (and American? British?) intelligence agencies have lost sight of his whereabouts?
The sources “neither denied nor confirmed whether Sinwar has survived Israeli assassination attempts during the war, and did not say whether IDF forces have drawn close to his hiding place. They also gave no hints about his location, such as whether he is hiding aboveground or in the tunnels.”
Meanwhile the New York Times has reported that current and former top Israeli military officials favor a hostage deal and a pullback from Gaza, saying Israel needs to conserve and replenish forces for a possible war with Hizballah and “can always go back and engage Hamas militarily in the future.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded that:
I don’t know who those unnamed parties are, but I’m here to make it unequivocally clear: it won’t happen…. We will end the war only after we have achieved all of its goals, including the elimination of Hamas and the release of all our hostages.
The political echelon defined these goals for the IDF…and the IDF has all the means to achieve them.
We will not succumb to defeatism, neither at The New York Times nor anywhere else. We are filled with the spirit of victory.
The Israel Defense Forces also responded officially to the Times report:
[We are] determined to keep fighting until [we] achieve[] the goals of the war, the destruction of Hamas’s military and governance capabilities, bringing back our hostages, and safely returning residents in the north and south to their homes.
The IDF will continue fighting Hamas across the Gaza Strip…alongside continuing to improve our readiness for a war in the north, and defending all of our borders.
But as the debate on whether Israel should accept a hostage deal on maximalist Hamas terms of a full withdrawal from Gaza rages on, one thing gets left out: there is no deal.
Despite months of wooing by the Biden administration—with, perhaps paradoxically, Netanyahu’s apparent approval—the Hamas leader, Sinwar, wherever he’s holed up, has been steadfastly refusing all terms for a deal even when they seem to include a clear commitment to an Israeli departure from Gaza.
The question is why, and in a powerful op-ed, former Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren lays out the reasons. They include the intense worldwide sympathy for the Palestinian cause, the erosion of Israeli unity as antigovernment demonstrators once again come out en masse, and heavy US pressure on Israel for a ceasefire and a withdrawal.
But most important of all, Oren, notes, is the fact that by keeping his own war with Israel going, Sinwar is likely, in effect, to push Israel into a much bigger and more dangerous war with Hizballah—one that could expand into the true, large-scale, multifront Middle Eastern conflagration that has been Sinwar’s true aim all along.
What it means is that, with a deal—even on those abovementioned terms—closed off, Israel’s wisest course is indeed to keep hitting Hamas hard, steadily upping the pressure on Sinwar and maybe, in the end, eliminating him.
As we saw in the brilliantly executed rescue of the iconic Noa Argamani and three other hostages on June 8, Israel is indeed capable of surprises.
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