Islamist Leadership
Israel says that the military chief and government boss of the Islamist group planned and carried out the October 7 attack. They are thought to be in Gaza. The chairman and other leaders of the group’s Political Bureau are living in Qatar.
IDF Minister Yoav Gallant told the leaders of the Islamist group Hamas, “They are living on borrowed time,” after their attack on October 7. Reports say that there is a poster of the names of Hamas leaders on the wall of his office in Tel Aviv.
The top of the pyramid is where Hamas’s high command is located. This includes Muhammed Deif, who is in charge of the group’s armed arm, the Izz elDeen alQassam Brigades, and Yahya Sinwar, who is in charge of Gaza for the group.
Israeli officials think that Deif, the shady commander who has dodged several attempts on his life, planned the October 7 attack that killed about 1,200 Israelis. Also, they say Sinwar must have been involved with the plans since he is in charge of the group in Gaza.
Ismail Haniyeh is in charge of running Hamas as a whole, while Sinwar and Deif are in charge of activities inside Gaza. Khaled Meshal is another important leader in the Islamist movement. He was one of the founders of Hamas’s Political Bureau and has been its head before. Mehshal and Haniyeh both live in Qatar.
Yahya Sinwar
The IDF said that Sinwar was “a dead man walking” after the attack on October 7. Since then, no one has seen him in public. Israeli officials say Sinwar is probably hiding in one of Gaza’s caves. One of the goals of Israel’s attack on Gaza, in which more than 15,000 people have already been killed, mostly women and children, is to capture or kill Sinwar.
Sinwar was born in a refugee camp in Khan Younis, which is in the southern part of Gaza. He grew up while Israel ruled the area. His parents were from Ashkelon, which is now Israel. They had to leave when Israel became a country in 1948, which Palestinians call the “Nakba” (catastrophe). Between 1948 and 1949, about 7.1 million Palestinians had to leave their homes. In the 1980s, Sinwar joined the Muslim Brotherhood. He was first taken by Israel when he was 19 years old, in 1982. Sinwar set up alMajd, Hamas’s internal security body, when the group was formed in 1987.
This organisation was accused of going after several Palestinians “for collaborating” with Israel. He was caught by Israeli police in 1988 and found guilty of killing 12 Palestinians. He was given four life terms. He was locked up in Israeli jails for 22 years. In 2011, Sinwar was freed as part of a deal in which Israel freed 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in return for Gilad Shalit, a soldier.
Hamas was already in charge of Gaza at that point. Sinwar was a cult figure in Hamas’s upper ranks because he used to be the head of internal security and spent 20 years in Israeli jails. He quickly rose in the movement. In 2017, he took over as leader of Hamas in Gaza from Ismail Haniyeh. Since then, he has stayed in that job.
Muhammed Deif
It has been on Israel’s list of people to kill since at least the early 2000s. He lost an eye in an Israeli attack in 2002. In 2006, Israel bombed a building where Hamas leaders were meeting. Deif was badly hurt in the attack, but he lived.
After weeks of fighting, an initial ceasefire was declared in August 2014. That same month, Israel attacked him from the air. His wife and two children were killed in the attack, but he got away again. The Palestinians called him “the cat with nine lives” because he could get away so often. Deif, whose real name is Mohammed Diab Ibrahim alMasri, was born in Khan Younis, Gaza, in the 1950s.
He went to school at Gaza’s Islamic University, which was started in 1978 by Hamas’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Deif was an active member of the Muslim Brotherhood. When Hamas was created after the first intifada in 1987, Deif joined the new Islamist movement. During the Intifada riots, the Israelis briefly detained him. Since Deif planned several strikes in the 1990s, he quickly moved up in Hamas’s ranks.
Israel killed the boss of the Qassam Brigades, Salah Shehade, in 2002, during the height of the second intifada. He was then put in charge of the group. The Brigades were named after Izz adDin alQassam, an Islamic preacher who was killed in 1935.
He led violent resistance against British colonialists and Zionist settlers in historic Palestine. The Brigades attacked both Israeli troops and citizens. Deif took over the Brigades, and Hamas launched a number of suicide strikes inside Israel. Israel blames him directly for the deaths of many of its own people. The United States has also called him a terrorist.
The U.S. State Department said in 2015 that Deif “is known for sending suicide bombers and ordering the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers.” Deif was in charge of Hamas’ offensive plan during the 2014 conflict. Hamas doesn’t say anything about where he is or his health. But both people who like and dislike Deif say that he is in charge of the Qassam Brigades.
Ismail Haniyeh
It is not clear how much power Haniyeh has over Hamas in Gaza, but he is seen as the group’s overall leader as head of the Political Bureau of Hamas. He currently lives in Qatar. A radical Hamas member named Haniyeh was caught several times by Israeli police in the late 1980s, just like Sinwar.
As soon as he got out of jail in 1992, Israel sent him and some other Hamas leaders to a no-man’s land in southern Lebanon. He went back to Gaza a year later. He quickly rose through the ranks of Hamas after being picked to run the office of Sheikh Yassin, the movement’s spiritual leader, in 1997.
At the time of the 2006 elections for parliament in the West Bank and Gaza, Haniyeh was the leader of Hamas in parliament. It was a surprise that the Islamist group won the election, and Haniyeh was named “Prime Minister of the State of Palestine.”
But when things got bad between Fatah, President Mahmoud Abbas’s party, and Hamas, Mr. Abbas got rid of the Hamas government in 2007. Haniyeh did not agree with his order, so he kept ruling from Gaza while Fatah took over in the West Bank. In 2017, Haniyeh gave up his job as boss of Hamas in Gaza. This made way for Sinwar’s rise. Meanwhile, Haniyeh took over as head of Hamas’s Political Bureau from Khaled Meshal that same year.
Khaled Meshal
Egypt has been after Meshal, one of the leaders of Hamas, for a long time. He was born in the West Bank in 1956. Mossad tried to kill Meshal by filling him with poison in 1997, when he was living in Jordan.
But two Mossad spies were caught by Jordanian police. King Hussein, who was leader of Jordan at the time, asked Israel to give him the medicine that would save his life, and Benjamin Netanyahu finally did it.
The failed plan to kill the president raised Meshal’s status within Hamas. Israel killed Hamas leaders Sheikh Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, and Meshal took over as the group’s main boss. Because he was in charge, Hamas won the election in 2006.
He stopped being the head of the Political Bureau in 2017 and is now in charge of the group’s branch outside of China. People think he is one of the most important leaders in the group.
🔻 The main point is that Yahya Sinwar, who was jailed by Israel for 22 years, has been in charge of Hamas in Gaza since 2017.
🔻 It has been on Israel’s list of people to kill since at least the early 2000s. Muhammed Deif is the leader of the al Quessam Brigades. He lost an eye in an Israeli attack in 2002. In 2006, he was badly hurt in another attack. Israel killed his family in another attack in 2014.
🔻 As the head of Hamas’s Political Bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, who lives in Qatar at the moment, is seen as the group’s overall boss.
