A battered Hamas charts path without its chief strategist

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Israel’s yearlong military campaign in Gaza has hollowed out the Palestinian militant group Hamas and killed some of its top leaders. But the death of Yahya Sinwar this week deprived the group of its chief strategist and leading proponent of all-out war with Israel.

Hamas, though diminished as a military force, is still fighting. And Sinwar’s violent vision for transforming the Middle East has been set in motion. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to prevent Hamas from achieving its aims, which include the destruction of Israel, and has pledged to eliminate the group, which led the Oct.

7, 2023, attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people. Killing Sinwar, a U.S.-designated terrorist, had long been a top priority in achieving that goal. Netanyahu signaled Thursday, after announcing Sinwar’s death, that the war wasn’t over.

He called on militants to surrender and release Israeli hostages. A senior Hamas leader, Khalil al-Hayya, responded in a televised address Friday: “These prisoners will not return unless the aggression on Gaza stops, the occupiers withdraw, and our heroic prisoners are released from Zionist prisons." Now, Hamas is faced with replacing Sinwar, who had expanded its military forces in Gaza, deepened its relationship with Iran and launched a war with the Oct. 7 attack that he hoped would bring the Palestinian cause to the fore of the world’s attention.

The group will be choosing a new leader for the second time in three months. Sinwar, who had been Hamas’s top leader in Gaza, took control of the group in August after political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in an explosion, blamed on Israel, at a military-run guesthouse in Tehran. The candidates to succeed him