Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 21 October 2024. © Richard Kemp
The final moments of Yahya Sinwar’s malevolent life are an allegory for the current balance of military power in Gaza. The once mighty terrorist leader was filmed skulking into a building in Rafah like the fugitive he was. His last, dazed act before a tank shell slammed into the room was to feebly toss a stick towards the watching drone.
Where were his layers of surveillance and security, the bodyguards to whisk him away when danger loomed? All gone, shattered by Israel’s ferocious assaults, with even Hamas’s most senior terrorist forced above ground by the IDF’s progressive destruction of his protective tunnels.
The devastation wreaked on Hamas over the last 12 months has left it in dire straits. Its organised structure has been decimated and its military campaign reduced to small-scale guerrilla operations with the priority on survival rather than offensive action. Many of the senior terrorist commanders have been killed. With his chain of command largely ineffective, fearful of using any form of electronic communications and an inability any longer to transit large parts of the Strip above or below ground, in latter days Sinwar could no longer exercise meaningful control over his troops. It is doubtful he could effectively communicate with Hamas elements outside Gaza either.
But his continued existence was still important. He was the embodiment of Hamas’s ‘resistance’ against Israel, the architect of the greatest achievement the organisation has ever had or is now likely to have – the mass murder, rape, torture and kidnapping of Jews on 7 October last year. Indeed he was a hero to the many Gazans who rejoiced in this bestial slaughter. For the Hamas terrorists who have survived until now he has been an inspiration and an example.
His death therefore will be a major psychological blow which in some will undermine the will to continue the fight. Since Israel’s offensive began to gain momentum we have seen large numbers of cornered terrorists surrender and others decide discretion is the better part of valour, discarding their weapons and melting back into the civilian population. I would expect that now to accelerate.
The death-throes of the terror group which Sinwar’s death represents may also encourage some Gazan clan leaders who are looking forward to seizing their own advantage for the post Hamas future. Although severely weakened over recent decades, it might be possible to restore their authority as an alternative form of governance at least in some parts of Gaza.
Plenty of terrorists however will remain defiant, galvanised to fight on, with vengeance added to their venom. Either way the end of Sinwar is not the end of Hamas. He will be replaced like other terrorist leaders such as Bin Laden, Baghdadi, Suleimani and Nasrallah, but with their terror armies badly weakened.
With Hamas’s hard-line leader out of the picture, is it now time for Israel to sue for peace? Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris think so and have together fired the starting gun for what will no doubt be another round of intensive pressure on Israel to end the war.
In both cases their judgement so far in this war has not been unimpeachable. For example, Biden and Harris demanded that the IDF should not enter Rafah earlier this year and threatened “consequences” if it did. Prime Minister Netanyahu was having none of that and, in the face of domestic political and military opposition as well, ordered an offensive against Hamas inside Rafah. With minimal civilian casualties, that move destroyed the rump Hamas military formations in the city and severed the terrorist lifeline beneath the Egyptian border.
It also led directly to the death of Sinwar. Immediately after that both Biden and Harris tried to claim some of the credit for the terrorist leader’s elimination but the reality is that if they’d had their way Sinwar would still be alive today.
The priority for President and Vice President, though, is not victory for Israel in an existential war, but victory for Harris at the polls, which they calculate a supposed peace deal would help secure.
But now is certainly not the time for Israel to give even lip-service to the exhortations of the miscalculating Biden and Harris. As in the past their demands that Israel stop fighting rather than calling for Hamas’s surrender give hope and strength to the terrorists, and to their Iranian masters, and help prolong the bloodshed. Instead, with Hamas reeling, now is the time to intensify the fight and drive home the advantage.
Netanyahu’s policy of attrition against the terror armies while eliminating their leadership, whether in Gaza, Lebanon or Iran, is certainly working. What would not work in any of these places is the Western obsession with ceasefires, peace deals and de-escalation. Against jihadist enemies, all such appeasement of those dedicated to your annihilation can at best only store up the same threat for another day, or an even greater one. We only have to look at the nightmare of Afghanistan, now a haven for global terrorist gangs after Biden catastrophically ceded the country to the Taliban.
In any case, Hamas doesn’t seem to want to play ball with the Biden-Harris desire for a peace deal. In the wake of Sinwar’s death, senior terrorist Khalil al Hayya made clear that Hamas will not free the hostages until the IDF has completely withdrawn from Gaza and released Palestinian terrorists from custody. That was of course Sinwar’s position and it’s not clear why Biden and Harris should think whoever takes over from him will be any less hard-line. Optimism is not a strategy.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
