Tareq Baconi on Death of Hamas Chief Sinwar & Why Killing Palestinian Leaders Won’t Pacify Resistance

Hamas has confirmed Israel killed the organization’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, marking what could be a turning point in its yearlong war. Sinwar was apparently not killed as part of a targeted strike, but in the course of Israel’s indiscriminate assault on the Gaza Strip. “It’s not a war that’s happening against Hamas … This is an Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people,” says Palestinian analyst Tareq Baconi, author of Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance. “The removal of someone like Yahya Sinwar will not stop the Netanyahu government from carrying out its genocide in the Gaza Strip.”

The U.S. administration has time and again suggested that they’re putting pressure on the Netanyahu government to achieve a ceasefire. But that’s absolutely not in line with what the American administration has done in practice, which is to arm Israel and enable it to maintain a genocide against the Palestinian people. So I think all the rhetoric that comes out from either Harris or Biden at the moment has to be seen only as political theater. I think in the best-case scenario, we have an American administration that’s been entirely coopted by the Netanyahu government and is being led into becoming complicit in genocide against its best interests and the interests of the Palestinian people. And at worst, we have an American administration that has fully embraced Netanyahu’s ideological view of exterminating the Palestinian people, regime change in the region, and carrying out that ideological project through American arms and money. So I don’t think that the obstacle to a ceasefire has ever been Sinwar and that now the removal of Sinwar is suddenly going to lead us into a ceasefire.

I think it’s very clear that the Netanyahu government is thinking about completely destabilizing Lebanon, of possibly carrying out some kind of operation in Iran that could lead to a regime change. What we’re seeing today is an attempt by Israel to remake the Middle East in such a way that they can maintain their reality as an apartheid state unchallenged in the region. And the Biden administration is fully accepting of that reality and hasn’t made any moves to really counter or put pressure on the Netanyahu government to either end its genocide or rethink these policies.