Hamas announced Tuesday that its leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, will replace Ismail Haniyeh as the head of its political bureau, it said in a statement. <\/p>\n
The Hamas statement said that the movement announces \u201cthe selection of Commander Yahya Sinwar as head of the movement\u2019s political bureau, succeeding the martyred leader Ismail Haniyeh, may God have mercy on him.\u201d <\/p>\n
Israel <\/strong>has publicly accused Sinwar of being the \u201cmastermind\u201d behind Hamas\u2019 terror attack against Israel on October 7 \u2013 though experts say he is likely one of several \u2013 making him one of the key targets of its war in Gaza. <\/p>\n He has remained at large in the vast warren of tunnels trenched beneath Gaza, moving frequently and possibly surrounded by hostages as human shields, US officials believe. <\/p>\n Sinwar\u2019s predecessor Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran last week, raising fears that Israel\u2019s conflict with Hamas and its allies could develop into a multi-front, fully-fledged war in the Middle East. <\/p>\n The Iranian government and Hamas say that Israel carried out the assassination. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement. <\/p>\n A longtime figure in the Islamist Palestinian group, Sinwar was responsible for building up Hamas\u2019 military wing before forging important new ties with regional Arab powers as the group\u2019s civilian and political leader. <\/p>\n He was elected to Hamas\u2019 main decision-making body, the Politburo, in 2017 as the political leader of Hamas in Gaza branch. However, he has since become the Politburo\u2019s de facto leader, according to research by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). <\/p>\n This is a developing story and will be updated.<\/i> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hamas announced Tuesday that its leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, will replace Ismail Haniyeh as…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6357,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6356\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}