Hamas has appointed Yahya Sinwar as its new leader, replacing Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in Tehran last week.
Sinwar has served as the group’s leader inside the Gaza Strip since 2017. He will now become the leader of the group’s political branch.
Sinwar is believed to still be in the Gaza Strip, although his current whereabouts are unknown.
The announcement comes at a time of heightened tensions in the Middle East, with Iran and its allies threatening to retaliate for Haniyeh’s killing, which they blame on Israel. Israel has yet to comment.
“The Islamic resistance movement Hamas announces the election of leader Yahya Sinwar as head of the movement’s political body,” a statement from Hamas said.
Sinwar is currently at the top of Israel’s most-wanted list. Israeli security agencies believe he was the mastermind behind the October 7, 2023 attacks, which left more than 1,200 people dead and 251 taken hostage back to Gaza.
Hamas has yet to release details about how the group’s political leadership, led by Sinwar, operates.
The 61-year-old has not been seen in public since the attack in October and is believed to be hiding “10 floors underground” in Gaza. United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke in June.
In the late 1980s, Sinwar founded a Hamas security agency called Majd, which was tasked with targeting Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel.
Sinwar spent most of his life in Israeli prisons – and after his third arrest in 1988, he was sentenced to four life sentences.
However, he was among 1,027 Palestinian and Israeli Arab prisoners released by Israel in 2011 in exchange for an Israeli soldier held by Hamas for more than five years.
He later returned to senior Hamas leadership positions and was appointed head of the group’s political office in the Gaza Strip in 2017.
The United States blacklisted Sinwar as an “international terrorist”.
