Only defiance from Netanyahu and Hayya
You’re hearing defiance from Netanyahu, and it’s echoed by Israeli politicians across the political spectrum, even members of the opposition who are saying that the Israeli army will stay in Gaza for years and the fight will continue.
With Hayya also expressing defiance, this calls into question what is going to happen, especially with those captives still being held in Gaza.
After it was announced that Sinwar had been killed, people in Israel were saying that now perhaps there is a moment for the government to enter a ceasefire and engage in diplomacy and get the issue of captives back front and centre.
What we’ve heard from Netanyahu, but also from Hayya, it seems as though it’s just defiance. We’re not hearing a lot from either the Israeli government or from Hamas as to what is going to happen next with the mediation of a ceasefire or how they can engage in a negotiation that will yield a prisoner swap for those captives.
Israeli PM thrives on a state of ‘perpetual war’
Netanyahu has molded an image of himself politically as an “indispensable wartime leader”, former Israeli government adviser Daniel Levy says.
Levy told Al Jazeera the coalition that the Israeli prime minister has formed “thrives on the perpetual war-making on the Palestinian people, their displacement, the ethnic cleansing”. He said this means Netanyahu has to keep things going as they are.
“Ideologically, this aligns with the positions, not only of Israel over decades, but even more egregiously, of this government.”
Killing of Haniyeh, Sinwar ‘decapitation attempts that fading colonial powers use’
Helena Cobban, co-author of Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters, says Israel’s killings of Haniyeh and Sinwar “are the sort of decapitation attempts that fading colonial powers use”.
“Colonial powers try to delegitimise national liberation movements as ‘terrorists’, and in the name of ‘fighting terrorism’, they inflict horrible violence, like the French in Algeria or the French and US in Vietnam,” she said in a statement provided by the Washington, DC-based Institute for Public Accuracy.
“But Palestinian resistance to occupation is wider than any set of individuals, and Hamas is not just in Gaza. It is certainly more popular among Palestinians throughout the whole of West Asia than the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas.”
PLO mourns death of Sinwar
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has expressed its condolences on Sinwar’s death and called for unity among all Palestinian factions.
The PLO is an umbrella organisation made up of several political parties that say they represent Palestinians worldwide.
In a statement, the PLO’s Executive Committee accused Israel of committing “massacres and genocide” against Palestinians and called for all Palestinian factions to stand united, especially after the death of Sinwar.
It called for a united struggle against Israel for the “full reclaiming of our rights, including the right of return, the end of the occupation, and the establishment of our Palestinian state on all our occupied territories based on the 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its eternal capital”.
In a separate statement, Fatah, a secular political party founded by diaspora Palestinians after the 1948 Nakba, said Israel’s policy of “killing and terrorism will not succeed in breaking the will of our people to achieve their legitimate national rights to freedom and independence”.
