After two days of intensive negotiations in Doha, Hamas has appointed Yahya Sinwar as its new overall chief, following the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last week. Sinwar, who has led the group’s operations inside the Gaza Strip since 2017, will now head its political wing.
A senior Hamas official told the BBC that Sinwar was unanimously chosen by the Hamas leadership to lead the movement. The announcement comes amid heightened tensions in the Middle East, as Iran and its allies threaten retaliation for Haniyeh’s killing, which they attribute to Israel. Israel has not commented on the matter.
During the negotiations in Doha, Hamas leaders deliberated various options for the group’s next chief. Ultimately, only two candidates were proposed: Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Hassan Darwish, who heads the General Shura Council responsible for electing Hamas’s Politburo. The council unanimously voted for Sinwar, which a Hamas official described to the BBC as “a message of defiance to Israel.”
“They killed Haniyeh, a flexible figure open to solutions. Now they must contend with Sinwar and the military leadership,” the official said.
Before his death, Ismail Haniyeh was seen by regional diplomats as a pragmatic figure driving Hamas’s political outreach. In contrast, Yahya Sinwar is considered one of Hamas’s most extreme leaders. He currently tops Israel’s most-wanted list, with Israeli security agencies believing he orchestrated the October 7, 2023, attacks that resulted in over 1,200 deaths and 251 people taken hostage into Gaza.
“The appointment of arch-terrorist Yahya Sinwar as the new leader of Hamas, replacing Ismail Haniyeh, is yet another compelling reason to swiftly eliminate him and wipe this vile organisation off the face of the Earth,” Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said in a statement on X.
“Yahya Sinwar is a terrorist responsible for the most brutal terrorist attack in history,” Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Rear Adm Daniel Hagari told Saudi news channel Al-Arabiya.
Sinwar has not been seen in public since the October attacks and is believed to be hiding “10 storeys underground” in Gaza, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in June.
Javed Ali, a former US National Security Council official, told the BBC that Sinwar’s appointment could further hinder ceasefire and hostage release talks, as he is “much more inflexible and much more difficult to negotiate with.”
Born in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza in 1962, Sinwar founded the Hamas security service Majd in the late 1980s, which targeted alleged Palestinian collaborators with Israel. He has spent much of his life in Israeli prisons and was sentenced to four life terms in 1988. He was released in a 2011 prisoner exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been held captive by Hamas for over five years.
The 61-year-old Sinwar was appointed head of Hamas’s political bureau in the Gaza Strip in 2017. The US includes Sinwar on its blacklist of “international terrorists.”
