Hamas named its Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar as chief, after Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination on July 31.
“The Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas announces the selection of Commander Yahya Sinwar as the head of the political bureau of the movement, succeeding the martyr Commander Ismail Haniyeh, may Allah have mercy on him,” the movement was quoted as saying in a statement by news agency Reuters.
Sinwar has been in hiding in Gaza since the start of the war with Israel, Reuters said.
Sinwar has spent half of his adult life in Israeli prisons, and was the most powerful Hamas leader alive after Haniyeh’s killing.
Yahya Sinwar, 61, was born in a refugee camp in Khan Younis in Gaza and was elected as the leader of Hamas in Gaza in 2017 after he got a reputation of a ruthless enforcer and an implacable enemy of Israel, Reuters reported.
Sinwar was the former head of the Al-Majd security apparatus, which was involved in punishing and killing Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel’s secret service, before he was jailed.
Notably, Ismail Haniyeh was killed after his residence was targeted in Tehran, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said in a statement, according to a Reuters report. Haniyeh was in Iran’s capital for the inauguration of President Masoud Pezeshkian.
In a statement, Hamas said Haniyeh was killed in “a treacherous Zionist raid on his residence in Tehran”.
The IRGC said that Haniyeh was killed by a “short-range projectile” with a 7 kg warhead fired from outside his residence in Tehran, Reuters reported. It said in a statement that the attack was carried out by Israel with support from the “criminal” US government.
“Based on investigations and analyses conducted, this terrorist operation was carried out with the firing of a short-range projectile equipped with a warhead weighing approximately 7 kilograms, accompanied by a powerful explosion, from outside the vicinity of the guests’ residence,” the IRGC said in the statement.
The United States, however, denied receiving advance knowledge of the assassination plot.
Haniyeh was assassinated just hours after Israel’s airstrike in Lebanon’s Beirut, killing Fuad Shukr, a military commander of Hezbollah, a Hamas ally.