New Hamas chief is an arsonist in a desert tinderbox

By Marc Champion

It’s been an article of faith in the West Asia that no player involved in the current standoff over Gaza has an interest in stoking a wider war. The appointment of Hamas military commander Yahya Sinwar to the organization’s top job should serve as a reminder that this was never quite true.

Sinwar fills a post that opened with the July 31 killing of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s politburo chairman, while on a visit to Tehran. The apparent assassination was one of two in quick succession that broke the rules of engagement in Israel’s perpetual hybrid conflict with Iran and its proxies. Both the Islamic Republic of Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah — whose de-facto deputy leader was killed by Israeli drones in Beirut the day before — have sworn retaliation.

The consensus among West Asia analysts is that both will pursue a form of attack that’s at once strong enough to re-establish deterrence with Israel, but not so bloody as to tip the region into a wider war that pulls in the military might of the US. Joseph Biden’s administration is working 24/7 to ensure just a Goldilocks outcome, after which it hopes — finally — to secure the Gaza cease-fire deal needed to more reliably defuse the conflict.

Sinwar, the architect of Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities against Israel, was always the organization’s ultimate decision maker, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters after the appointment. With the Gaza cease-fire talks in their final stage, Blinken said “we believe strongly that they should come across the finish line very, very soon.” Let’s hope he’s right — it has long been the logical choice for both Israelis and Palestinians. But if there is a quick resolution, it’s likely to be despite Sinwar’s elevation rather than because of it.

The 61-year-old militant launched his terrorist attack on Israel 10 months ago in the full knowledge that this would force exactly the kind of overwhelming response it’s provoked. He’d been preparing for years, lulling Israel into complacency by signaling that he was no longer interested in violence, but all the while building up Hamas’s military and tunnel infrastructure.

In messages to other Hamas leaders that the Wall Street Journal published in June, Sinwar described Gaza’s tens of thousands of civilian deaths as “necessary sacrifices” to the cause. Hamas, he said, now had the Israelis “exactly where we want them.” He demanded that Palestinian negotiators agree only to a permanent cease-fire. In other words, he thought Hamas was winning. The one thing that hadn’t yet gone his way was the expectation that Hezbollah and Iran would pile in.

Blinken and the general consensus have been right that Iran doesn’t want a full-blown war, which Tehran knows would risk the severe degradation of its prize asset, Hezbollah’s missile strike capabilities, as well as inviting attacks on Iranian soil at a time when the regime is deeply unpopular at home. Nor does Hezbollah want an Israeli invasion, for similar reasons, and nor does the US, for different ones. The Israel Defense Forces also know the cost of another Lebanese invasion would be fearsome, given the vast arsenal Hezbollah has assembled since the IDF’s last inconclusive incursion in 2006.

And yet, Hezbollah continues to fire volleys across the border almost daily, saying it won’t stop the harassment until there’s a cease-fire in Gaza. Israel, meanwhile, says its tolerance for having to keep tens of thousands of Israelis away from their homes due to the shelling is at an end. It all resembles a circular firing squad, in which no one will put down their weapons until the war in Gaza ends, but at a time when the two people needed to make that happen — Hamas’s new political chief and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — don’t want a cease-fire unless the other capitulates.

Netanyahu played along with the US-led peace talks, only to sabotage them with new demands when they came close to success. Hamas, driven by Sinwar, has done much the same, insisting that any Israeli withdrawal must be permanent, while offering no withdrawal of its own. Even a newly elected Israeli premier, freed from the constraints of Netanyahu’s extremist cabinet, would have a hard time agreeing to a permanent peace that left Hamas in charge of Gaza and Sinwar a free man.

Sinwar studied his opponents closely while in an Israeli jail, according to a New York Times interview with the prison dentist who once saved his life — by diagnosing a malignant brain tumor — and came to know him well. The story is telling, because Sinwar was released in a 2011 prisoner swap of a single Israeli soldier for more than 1,000 Palestinians, despite having blocked it in negotiations because it didn’t meet his maximalist demands. The Israelis solved that problem by placing him in solitary confinement, clearing the way for a deal with more pragmatic Hamas negotiators.

There’s no putting Sinwar in solitary confinement now that he’s the movement’s leader. Until killed or captured, he will hold the second of two keys required to unlock peace in Gaza and so de-escalate tensions at Israel’s border with Lebanon. That will remain the case even if Iran, Hezbollah and the US can succeed in calibrating their expected counterpunch to Israel’s assassinations in a way that avoids escalation, because Sinwar — like his fellow keyholder, Netanyahu — is an arsonist in a desert tinderbox.