Failed diplomacy keeps Sinwar in control - opinion

Where is Yahya Sinwar? Is he even alive? Over the past weekend, speculation was once again rife within the Israeli media that the top Hamas leader may have been eliminated. However, solid evidence either way is still to emerge. As long as this remains the case, there is little hope of ending the war and securing the release of the hostages.

Israelis are understandably hoping that the rumor that Sinwar is no more will be confirmed. An even better outcome would be his capture alive so that the mastermind of the October 7 mass slaughter – the “new Hitler,” in the description of the Israeli government’s chief hostage negotiator, Gal Hirsch – can answer in court for his atrocities. 

Yet Sinwar remains elusive. Almost a year after the massacre by Hamas, he has yet to appear in public, while DNA tests on the bodies of dead Hamas terrorists brought to Israel for forensic analysis have so far failed to provide a match.

The speculation that Sinwar may be dead stems from the realization that he has been largely silent for a lengthy period. This, despite being selected at an August gathering of Hamas’s 50-man Shura Council to replace Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in Tehran on July 31, to be at the helm of the Iran-backed terrorist organization.

In the interim, there have been media reports of at least three messages allegedly sent by Sinwar to foreign leaders and the other proxies in Iran’s regional “Axis of Resistance.” 

In early September, a congratulatory message in Sinwar’s name was dispatched by Hamas to Algeria’s new president, Abdelmajid Tebboune, following his victory in an election that opposition parties said was rigged. That was swiftly followed by another message to the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen – after they fired a missile toward central Israel – in which he apparently assured them that Hamas was ready for a “long battle of attrition.”

Then, on September 13, Hamas posted a letter on its Telegram channel dated four days earlier in which Sinwar thanked Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah for his organization’s relentless targeting of northern Israel with missiles and rockets. However, Israeli intelligence is reportedly skeptical that any of these messages were penned by Sinwar, assessing that they were likely written in his name by another Hamas official, according to an Israeli Army Radio report on September 23.

The multi-front war

AS THE MULTI-front war triggered by the Hamas barbarities has dragged on throughout 2024, Israel has made extraordinary progress in eliminating key leaders and operatives from Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Israeli intelligence is said to be behind a spectacular operation in Lebanon that incapacitated or killed hundreds of Hezbollah operatives with booby-trapped pagers and hand-held radios. Additionally, the Israel Air Force eliminated Hezbollah’s main military commander Ibrahim Aqil and most of the leaders of its elite Radwan Force.

Israel had been telling Iran’s proxies that they were dead men walking through its actions, and not mere words. In addition to Haniyeh, the toll this year includes Mohammed Deif, head of Hamas’s Qassam Brigades; Fuad Shukr, Aqil’s immediate predecessor; and key IRGC commanders taken out in strikes on Syria, among them Brig. Gen. Razi Mousavi, its leading military official in Syria, and Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the top commander of the IRGC’s international arm, the Quds Force, in Syria and Lebanon. 

Many of these terrorists have American blood on their hands. The Biden administration should be thanking our Israeli allies, not wagging its finger at them.

THIS EXPANSIVE target selection demonstrates Israel’s understanding that its war against Hamas and Hezbollah is ultimately a war against the head of the octopus – the Islamic Republic of Iran – and not just its terrorist tentacles. Victory will only come once the brutal theocracy in Tehran is neutralized as a global threat.

Therefore, supporting the efforts of millions of Iranians to topple the regime should be an American and Israeli national security priority. Sinwar should be seen as one element in this terrorist mosaic, given what he symbolizes for an Israeli public still traumatized by the worst mass slaughter of Jews since the Nazi Holocaust.

Sinwar is a critical part of this rogues’ gallery for another important reason. The fate of the remaining hostages in Gaza who were seized by Hamas on October 7 lies in his hands. If there is a deal to be done – as the Biden-Harris administration keeps insisting is the case, despite successive failures to deliver one – it will require Sinwar’s consent.

The agonizing fate of the hostages has been skillfully exploited by Hamas, knowing that this is the main issue dividing the thousands of Israelis demonstrating for their immediate release from the government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Hirsch, the Israeli negotiator, even offered Sinwar and his family safe passage out of Gaza in exchange for the remaining 101 hostages, many if not most of whom are likely to be dead by now. Yet Sinwar hasn’t budged.

The United States, which should be taking the lead, has been reduced to grumbling about Sinwar’s intransigence without applying any pressure on Iran or its Hamas proxy. “[Sinwar] is the obstacle, no questions about it,” White House national security communications advisor John Kirby said on September 22. “It’s tough to get [Sinwar] to say yes to things that he’s already said he wants.”

The same administration has made much of the ostensible roles of both Qatar and Egypt as mediators with Hamas, again without any success. Indeed, assuming Sinwar is still alive in the Hamas tunnels deep beneath Gaza, one can reasonably ask whether either of these Arab states retains any contact with him.

If they do, then it is incumbent on the United States to make public the content of their discussions. If they don’t, because Sinwar is either dead or indefinitely incommunicado, then we are forced to question the value of Egypt and Qatar’s role in the hostage negotiations when they can’t even prove that Sinwar is alive.

Remember, outside of last November’s hostage release, the liberation of some of those still in captivity – either alive or dead following their execution by their Hamas captors – has been secured through special operations mounted by the IDF, the Israel Police, and Israeli intelligence.

Speculation about Sinwar’s fate, therefore, is ultimately the result of the failed diplomacy advocated by the United States and its Arab allies. The maxim that negotiating with terrorists rarely, if ever, yields positive results unless it is backed up by maximum pressure is long-established, but Washington and the Arab capitals continue to pretend otherwise. What that means is that alive or dead, when it comes to the Israeli hostages in Gaza, Sinwar remains in control.

Mark Dubowitz is the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Ben Cohen is a senior analyst.