Shortly after the Hamas attack, in October 2023, a group of cowboysHaYovel, a US evangelical Zionist organization that sends hundreds of volunteers each year to Jewish settlement farms in the West Bank, distributed among Israeli troops 10,000 copies of a deck of cards with the names and images of the 52 most wanted men in the world. Islamist movement. The idea was based on a similar deck, the one that the US intelligence services gave to their soldiers during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The highest value card, the ace of spades, then belonged to Saddam Hussein, because everyone in Washington They understood that his capture (which took place months later and ended in his execution) marked the difference between victory and defeat. In the Hamas deck, Yahia Sinwar was not the most valuable card, but rather the queen of hearts (in a sexist attempt to humiliate him), but everyone in Israel was very clear that, without crossing her out, the circle of revenge would always remain incomplete. , even though Israel already declared 30 of the 52 names on the letters dead.It is precisely this symbolic character that now offers the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, an opportunity to take advantage of his victory photoforseal the ceasefire in Gaza that has been avoided for months.
He himself pointed this out, after speaking with the president of the United States, Joe Biden. The two leaders “have agreed that there is an opportunity to advance the release of the hostages and that they will work together to achieve this goal,” their office said in a statement around midnight on Thursday. It is also what the forum that represents the families of the 101 hostages left (with and without life) in Gaza and what other voices have raised during the day had asked him – as soon as he heard the news –as Dennis Ross, the former US special envoy to the Middle East under Bill Clinton who mediated negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians: “With the Hamas leaders in Gaza gone, Israel should say it is going to end the war, always.” and when the hostages are released.”
Sinwar’s head has long been perceived as the ladder that Netanyahu needed to descend with relative dignity from the tree of unattainable “total victory” that he had climbed. The problem is that that escape planIt made more sense months ago, when its popularity was at rock bottom and doubts were growing in the country about the strategic purpose of the invasion. Now, the prime minister is once again the favorite in the polls and the same intelligence services that did not see the attack on October 7, 2023 coming have healed the wounded pride after, first, the remote detonation of thousands of beepers and walkie talkiesthat Hezbollah had commissioned (which has been more talked about for Mossad’s technical prowess than for its death toll and injuries) and then, the assassination of – in Netanyahu’s words – Hezbollah’s leader for three decades, Hasan “Nasrallah, his successor [Hashem Safieddine] and the successor of his successor,” along with almost the entire military leadership of Hezbollah.
Eran Etzion, former deputy director general of Israel’s National Security Council, summed up this mood on the social network surrender with the hostages, monetary rewards to whoever provides immediate and reliable information about their whereabouts and would announce that he is willing to have an immediate ceasefire in Gaza,” taking advantage of the weakness of the Islamist movement. “What will the incompetent Government do?: Celebrate the elimination and attribute it to the military pressurewhich was actually reduced considerably; trying to escalate the fighting in Gaza, even at the cost of the lives of the hostages; and continue their efforts to prolong and expand the war across the board, with an emphasis on attacking Iran and dragging the United States into the war.”
Israel is currently focusing on Lebanon, where it bombs and demands evacuations of the population on a daily basis (further and further away from the border), while trying to advance by land in the south, where it has just announced the loss of five soldiers. . With Hamas amortized and limited to pockets of armed resistance, the important battle is against Hezbollah. So much so that Defense Minister Yoav Gallant himself would have preferred to start a war as soon as Israel received the first projectile from Lebanon (the day after the Hamas attack) instead of waiting a year, as he ended up doing. A ceasefire in Gaza would now allow it to divert troops from Gaza to the Lebanese front, on the way to becoming another long war of attrition.
Before killing Sinwar, Israel assassinated his predecessor at the head of Hamas, Ismail Haniye, in Tehran; the number two politician, Saleh al Aruri; and considers the military leader, Mohamed Deif, and number three, Marwan Issa, dead. Hamas insists that no one is irreplaceable, because ideas matter more than names, but its most important living position is now only Khaled Meshal, who lives in Qatar, one of the three countries negotiating the end of the war. In Gaza, the insurgency will likely remain in the hands of Mohamed Sinwar, Yahia’s brother.
“Mission accomplished”
“Mission accomplished,” Gallant tweeted, along with the crossed out faces of Deif, Nasrallah and Sinwar. But, just like when George W. Bush uttered that same phrase about the aircraft carrier Abraham LincolnIn 2003, eight years before Barack Obama withdrew troops and chaos in the country claimed a million lives, the death of the Hamas leader did not automatically mean the end of the war, any more than the assassination last month of Nasrallah. south of Beirut has not put an end to the shelling against Israel.
To begin with, because Sinwar had not been considered the main obstacle to a ceasefire agreement, but Netanyahu, as many admit behind closed doors. And his death comes at a time of war euphoria in Israel, with the hostage dossier forgotten, the military wind in its favor and a pending retaliation against Iran for its latest missile attack last month. For now, when announcing it, Netanyahu has taken advantage of the fact that Sinwar was in Rafah to boast of having ordered the invasion of the area in May, despite “all the pressures”, in reference to the fact that Biden and other international leaders marked it as a “line red” today more forgotten than ever.
Benny Gantz, the former minister under Netanyahu and former chief of the General Staff who has gone from king in the polls to a second place after abandoning the war government in June, has already made it clear that the fall of Sinwar isan “important achievement,” but the army “will continue to operate in Gaza for years to come.”
Against the horizon of the ceasefire, another emerges: Israel lacks a minimally realistic plan to soon succeed Hamas in the Strip, it has appointed a military person in charge of humanitarian aid and has surrounded the north of the Strip with enormous violence in recent years. weeks, just where Sinwar was not. Netanyahu has assured that Israel’s plan is not to rebuild the settlements that it unilaterally evacuated in 2005, but up to 10 of the 32 deputies of his party, the Likud, will attend a conference next week at the gates of the Palestinian enclave with the slogan ” Preparing to resettle in Gaza” and the goal of declaring: “Gaza is ours, forever.”