Haniyeh is Sinwar’s Victim

Ismail Haniyeh was aware that he was on the top of the Mossad’s hit list, even though Israel knew he had no connection to the October 7 attack. For years, Haniyeh had been at odds with Yahya Sinwar and the current leadership of Hamas. He was ousted from the leadership of the movement, which he had headed from 2006 until 2017.
Sinwar, who came from Israeli prisons after serving twenty years, gained the trust of the military wing of the organization. Through them, he took control of the leadership and won the elections, working to sideline Haniyeh and his men, accusing him of cowardice, favoring political solutions, and yielding to regional pressures.
This does not place Haniyeh in the history of the cause as a dove or a peace advocate, but he was known to be more pragmatic and less adventurous. Even in the Doha negotiations in recent months to find a solution to end the Gaza war, Haniyeh tried but failed to pressure Sinwar, who undermined all that Haniyeh had worked on and achieved in months of difficult negotiations.
So why did the Israelis assassinate Haniyeh?
He was assassinated because he was the head of Hamas and its most famous leader. If Haniyeh had succeeded a few months ago in stopping the war according to the agreement the negotiators were seeking, he might have saved the lives of thousands of Palestinians, including his own.
Eliminating him serves the extremists within Hamas, and of course, Netanyahu’s government, which achieved one of its most important promises: eliminating Hamas leaders, even if they couldn’t capture Sinwar.
Netanyahu and Sinwar destroyed the future of Hamas, and the movement, along with Gaza, became a victim of extremist calculations, joined by Tehran, which decided late last year to try to change the rules of the Palestinian game and prevent regional reconciliation efforts. The price was costly for both Israel and Iran, with the highest price paid by the Palestinians, of whom Haniyeh was one of the nearly forty thousand so far.
Some might be surprised that we are mourning Haniyeh after we had been accusing him, and this is right and what we feared happened. Haniyeh and Hamas’s supporters continued to bet that Tehran and its political project would achieve their goal of a Palestinian state through the military pressure policy that Tehran pursues via its extensive network of proxies. This mirage has only brought more terrifying losses and setbacks in favor of Israel. Yet we know that Haniyeh, unlike Sinwar, due to his political experience, was capable of changing the course of the movement and using the crisis to reach a solution, possibly beyond a ceasefire and even beyond Gaza itself.
This political failure, the missed opportunities, and the innocent lives lost cannot be justified. We can only pray for mercy for Haniyeh and hope that the Palestinians are compensated with wise leadership that can save them from Israeli tyranny, Arab chaos, and regional exploitation.