ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR: ISRAEL'S MOST WANTED THREE

 


ISRAEL’S MOST WANTED THREE

"The entire planet will be under our law, there will be no more Jews or Christian traitors.“ ........Mahmoud al-Zahar, HAMAS Commander

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has a poster hanging on a wall of his office in Tel Aviv, in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas. It shows mugshots of hundreds of the Palestinian militant group's commanders arranged in a pyramid.

At the bottom are Hamas' junior field commanders. At the top is its high command, including Mohammed Deif, the shadowy mastermind of last month's assault.

The poster has been re-printed many times after Israel invaded Gaza in retaliation for Oct. 7: the faces of dead commanders marked each with a cross.

But the three men topping Israel's hit-list remain at large: Deif, the head of Hamas' military wing, the Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades; his second in command, Marwan Issa; and Hamas' leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar.

Hostilities resumed in Gaza on Friday after a seven-day truce brokered by Qatar collapsed. Sources in the region, familiar with Israeli thinking, said that Israel's offensive in Gaza was unlikely to stop until those three top Hamas commanders are dead or captured.

The 61-year-old Sinwar, as well as Deif and Issa, both 58, form a secretive three-man military council atop Hamas that planned and executed the Oct. 7 attack.

The three leaders are directing Hamas' military operations and led negotiations for prisoner-hostage swaps, possibly from bunkers beneath Gaza.

Killing or capturing the three men will likely be a long and arduous task but might signal that Israel was close to shifting from all-out war to less intense counter insurgency operations. That does not mean that Israel's fight against Hamas would stop.

Officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have said Israel's objectives are the destruction of Hamas' military and governmental capabilities, bringing the hostages back, and ensuring that the area around Gaza will never be threatened by a repeat of the Oct. 7 attack. To achieve those goals, eliminating the leadership of Hamas will be essential.

"They are living on borrowed time," Gallant told a news conference last week, indicating that Israeli intelligence agency Mossad would hunt down the militant group's leadership anywhere in the world.

Backed by drones and aircraft, Israeli troops have swept through less populated northern and western parts of Gaza but the hardest, and most destructive, phase of the fighting may lie ahead.

Israeli troops have not pushed deep into Gaza City, stormed the maze of tunnels where Hamas' command is believed to be located, or invaded the enclave's densely populated south, they added. Some of those tunnels are believed to be around 80 meters deep, making them difficult to destroy from the air.

The Israeli military says it has destroyed around 400 tunnel shafts in northern Gaza, but that is only a small part of the network Hamas has built up over the years.

A military officer, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, estimated roughly around 5,000 Hamas fighters had been killed, equivalent to roughly one fifth of its overall strength. Six battalions – numbering around 1,000 men each had been significantly degraded, the officer said.

One Hamas insider in Gaza, reached by phone, said that destroying the group as a military force would mean house to house combat and fighting in the warren of tunnels beneath the enclave, which would take a long time..

President Joe Biden's administration sees eliminating Hamas' leadership as a far more attainable goal for Israel than the country's stated objective of eliminating Hamas entirely, three U.S. officials told Reuters.

While staunchly supportive of Israel, its closest ally in the Middle East, U.S. officials worry that an open-ended conflict driven by Israel's hope of destroying Hamas entirely would cause a heavy civilian death toll in Gaza and prolong the risk of a regional war.

The United States learned that lesson over years of battling al Qaeda, Islamic State and other groups during a two-decade-long global war on terrorism.

The shock and fear in Israel engendered by Hamas' Oct. 7 attack may make it difficult to de-escalate the conflict.

In Israel, there is strong popular support for the war to continue as Hamas is perceived as part of a broad Iran-backed axis that poses a direct threat to the nation's survival.

Capturing Sinwar would be an important victory but not necessarily the ultimate one.

Israeli society perceives itself under an existential threat and the options it sees before it are two only: To be or not to be.



The objective of the war remains to dismantle Hamas' military and government capabilities which could involve a turbulent period in Gaza after the war. And the greater long-term challenge was to remove the popular appeal to Palestinians of Hamas' fierce opposition to Israel using education and outreach

Israel regularly announces the deaths of senior Hamas battalion commanders. An Israeli military officer, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity, said the IDF viewed the elimination of such combat-level commanders as essential to dismantling Hamas' military capabilities.

The three Hamas leaders have all escaped numerous Israeli operations to kill them. Deif in particular lives in the shadows after escaping seven assassination attempts before 2021, which cost him an eye and left him with a serious leg injury.

An Israeli air strike in 2014 killed his wife, his three-year-old daughter and seven-month-old son.

Speculation by Israeli and Palestinian sources is that the three men are hiding in the tunnels under the enclave but five sources close to their thinking say they could be anywhere within Gaza.

Sinwar, who unlike the elusive Deif and Issa has often appeared in the past at public rallies, is no longer using any electronic devices for fear the Israelis could track the signal.

Issa, known as the 'Shadow Man', is perhaps the least well known of the three but has been involved in many of Hamas' major decisions of recent years, and would replace either of the two other men if they are killed or captured.

All three men were born into refugee families that had fled or been expelled in 1948 from areas in the newly created Israeli state.

And all three men have spent years in Israeli prisons. Sinwar served 22 years after being jailed in 1988 for the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers and the murder of four Palestinian collaborators.

He was the most senior of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners that Israel freed in 2011 in exchange for one of its soldiers, Gilad Shalit, captured by Hamas in a cross-border raid five years earlier.

Like Deif, Issa's facial features were unknown to the public until 2011 when he appeared in a group photo taken during the Shalit prisoner's exchange, which he helped to organize.

Israel has killed Hamas' leaders in the past, including the group's founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and its former leader Abdel-Aziz al-Rantisi, assassinated in a 2004 air strike.

New commanders rose to fill their ranks.

 

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