Yahya Sinwar named as new Hamas chief

KABUL (Pajhwok): Hamas has named Yahya Sinwar its new chief after Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran last week.

The group’s leadership unanimously chose Sinwar to lead the Palestinian movement, the BBC reported, citing a senior Hamas leader.

Since 2017, Sinwar has served as the group's leader inside the Gaza Strip. He will now become leader of its political wing.

Over the course of two days in Doha, intensive meetings involving Hamas’s leading figures hammered out the options for the group's next chief.

Sinwar, and Mohammed Hassan Darwish, a shadowy figure who heads the General Shura Council, a body that elects Hamas's Politburo, were considered for the top slot.

The council voted unanimously to choose Sinwar, in what one Hamas official described to the BBC as “a message of defiance to Israel”.

“They killed Haniyeh, the flexible person who was open to solutions. Now they have to deal with Sinwar and the military leadership,” the official commented.

Sinwar was born in a Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza in 1962. In the late 1980s, he founded the Hamas security service known as Majd, which among other things targeted alleged Palestinian collaborators with Israel.

He has spent much of his life in Israeli jail - and after his third arrest in 1988 he was sentenced to four life terms in prison.

Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran on Wednesday, the Palestinian group announced, blaming Israel for killing its political chief along with a bodyguard.

sa/mud