Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar sent a message to a senior operative saying that he believed it was time to revive suicide bombings, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing Arab intelligence officials.
Sinwar, who assumed complete control of Hamas over the summer following the death of Ismail Haniyeh, was a chief architect of Hamas’s cross-border massacres in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
The WSJ noted that Hamas largely stopped using suicide bombings nearly two decades ago, as some of its leaders feared that such tactics could politically isolate the group.
Yet since October 7, Hamas leaders such as Sinwar and Khaled Mashaal have called for these radical terror attacks to continue.
In August, Mashaal spoke at a conference in Turkey, stating, “We want to return to martyrdom operations. This situation can only be addressed by open conflict. They are fighting us with open conflict, and we are confronting them with open conflict.”
In the past week, Hamas has claimed responsibility for two separate shooting attacks in Israel—one in Tel Aviv that killed seven and a second in Beersheba that killed a female Israeli soldier.
Sinwar’s violent path
The WSJ wrote that for years, Hamas had been split between extreme conservatives such as Sinwar, who view the deaths of civilians as necessary to destabilize Israel, and terrorists who countenance violence but want the group to preserve some political legitimacy as a route to achieving its aims of a Palestinian state.
Sinwar is now imposing his more violent vision on Hamas as they continue fighting against the IDF in Gaza, the WSJ reported.
“Under Sinwar, Hamas can be expected to be a much clearer-cut, hard-line fundamentalist organization,” said Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute think tank, the WSJ wrote.
