Courtesy: Aljazeera
Elijah Magnier, a military and political analyst, said the Israeli and US characterization of how Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was reportedly killed is far from the reality.
“It is not at all an intelligence operation nor a targeted assassination,” Magnier told Al Jazeera.
“It’s a clash between three people, three militants who were in a location and opened fire against soldiers who are invading Rafah,” Magnier said.
Israeli forces “opened fire from their tank, destroying the location and this is how, the next day, they found Sinwar with another commander in a house above the ground and not in tunnels,” he said.
“Everybody is claiming victory, quoting intelligence collaboration … Shin Bet from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Kamala Harris saying we have been collaborating to make sure that we reach out and arrest or bring to justice all of the Hamas leaders, which has nothing to do with the reality of the event on the ground,” he added.
Roxane Farmanfarmaian, a lecturer on international relations of the Middle East at the University of Cambridge, told Al Jazeera that some of the possible leaders who might take Yahya Sinwar’s place are more “hardline” than he was. Others include more pragmatic figures such as Khaled Meshaal, the former head of Hamas’s political directorate, who is more of a “negotiation expert”, Farmanfarmaian said.
