Worldcrunch
In his first extensive interview since the ceasefire, longtime influential Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzouk said the group is running Gazan affairs, despite Israel’s attempt to unseat it. Still, Abu Marzouk said Hamas is seeking a future Palestinian unity leadership that it doesn’t necessarily have to run on its own.
Tipped to succeed slain leader Yahya Sinwar, Hamas commander Mohammed Deif, has just been targeted by an ICC arrest warrant. Back in July, Israel said Deif had been killed in a strike, but Hamas has insisted that he is alive and well.
The Israeli military says Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, has been killed in Gaza. The strike is a major victory for Israel, closing a chapter in recent Palestinian history in which Sinwar rose to the top of Hamas, and bet everything on the Oct. 7 attack, which made him more divisive than ever among the people of Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out a careful plot to push and ultimately shatter the long-established “rules of engagement” in the Middle East. It caught everyone, from Iran to Hezbollah to the White House, by surprise. The aim is to remake the whole region to revolve around Israel.
For two decades Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah spoke about destroying Israel, but in recent speeches, he’s just demanding it pull out of Gaza. It’s one more sign that its patrons in Tehran have made a calculation to try to salvage a status quo in the region.
Tehran claims the visiting Hamas leader was struck down in the capital with a “high-tech” missile or drone, so his killing could not be attributed to another security lapse on the ground against the chief suspect, Israel.
By eliminating Saleh al-Arouri, an important Hamas leader, with a drone strike in Beirut, Israel has taken a risky gamble: that Lebanon’s Hezbollah and its Iranian allies will not go to war over the death on Lebanese territory of a top Hamas figure.