6:47 p.m.: Hamas leader Yahya Sinouar was “eliminated” during an operation in the Gaza Strip, Israeli authorities announced this Thursday. This death constitutes a decisive blow to the Palestinian Islamist movement that Israel has been tracking for more than a year. Yahya Sinouar, radical activist and man in the shadows, was considered one of the masterminds of the attack of unprecedented scale carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023 on Israeli soil, which sparked the war in the Palestinian territory and ignited the powder in the region.
Aged 61 and leader since 2017 of the Palestinian Islamist movement in Gaza, he was named political leader of Hamas in early August, after the death of Ismaïl Haniyeh, killed in Tehran on July 31 in an attack blamed on Israel.
4:23 p.m.: The Israeli army announced Thursday that it was verifying whether Hamas leader Yahya Sinouar had been “eliminated” during an operation in the Gaza Strip, which could be a decisive blow to the Palestinian Islamist movement that it been fighting for over a year.
Yahya Sinouar, radical activist and man in the shadows, is considered one of the masterminds of the attack of unprecedented scale carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023 on Israeli soil, which sparked the war in the Palestinian territory and ignited the powder in the region.
Aged 61 and leader since 2017 of the Palestinian Islamist movement in Gaza, he was named political leader of Hamas in early August after the death of Ismaïl Haniyeh, killed in Tehran on July 31 in an attack blamed on Israel.
“During the army’s operations in the Gaza Strip, three terrorists were eliminated,” the army said in a statement.
Israeli forces are “verifying the possibility that one of the terrorists is Yahya Sinouar”, and “at this stage, the identities of the terrorists cannot be confirmed”, the statement added.
An Israeli security source said DNA analyzes were being carried out on a body to confirm whether it was Sinouar.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant wrote shortly after on the social network X: “We will reach every terrorist and we will eliminate them.”
These declarations come in an explosive context in the Middle East, where Israel has been shelling the positions of Hezbollah in Lebanon since September 23, which opened a cross-border front against it the day after October 7 in support of Hamas.
A week later, on October 30, the Israeli army launched ground operations in southern Lebanon to combat the Lebanese Islamist movement.
At midday Thursday, strikes targeted several regions in the south and east of Lebanon, Hezbollah strongholds with the southern suburbs of Beirut, according to images from AFPTV and the official Lebanese agency.
