His death, which has not yet been confirmed, would be a significant moment in Israel’s yearlong offensive against the militant group and could complicate efforts to release dozens of hostages held in Gaza.
In Gaza, no figure loomed larger in determining the war’s trajectory than the 61-year-old Hamas leader. Obsessive, disciplined and dictatorial, he was a rarely seen veteran militant who learned Hebrew over years spent in Israeli prisons and who carefully studied his enemy.
In 2008, Sinwar survived an aggressive form of brain cancer after treatment at a Tel Aviv hospital.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released him in 2011 along with about 1,000 other prisoners in exchange for Gilad Schalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in a cross-border raid. Netanyahu was harshly criticized for releasing dozens of prisoners held for involvement in deadly attacks.
Back in Gaza, Sinwar closely coordinated between Hamas’ political leadership and its military wing, the Qassam Brigades. He also cultivated a reputation for ruthlessness. He is widely believed to be behind the unprecedented 2016 killing of another top Hamas commander, Mahmoud Ishtewi, in an internal power struggle.
Sinwar was born in 1962 in Gaza’s Khan Younis refugee camp to a family that was among hundreds of thousands of Palestinians driven from what is now Israel during the 1948 war surrounding its creation.
And the next generation will be born to survivors of this.
People raised in situations like this don’t often grow up into peaceful people, because they’re not raised in a peaceful environment.
That’s why (as many jokes were made about it) America switched to “hearts and minds” half a century ago.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearts_and_Minds_(Vietnam_War)
If you try to crush a population for obedience, you can’t ever take the boot off, and they’ll always try to push you off. You have to genuinely look out for their best interests and over time win them over.
And that would take a very long time for Israel to convince their neighbors, but it’s the only way for a permanent solution besides Israel killing all of their neighbors, which (and I shouldn’t have to say this) is not an acceptable solution.
You can’t ask the victim to “be the bigger person” if they do it first, they’re still under the boot and the boot won’t move.
That’s literally why the phrase is “be the bigger person” because part of it involves the stronger person being the one who wants peace.
The only realistic way I see the situation being better here is if the United States imposes it. Nobody else has the power to do so and keep the peace. The United Nations is losing its credibility every passing day but maybe there is still enough time where Palestine being placed under UN trusteeship with the USA, Israel, and one Arab nation as joint trustees would be acceptable to the key stakeholders here. Eventually, once the situation stabilises, the goal would be to grant the Palestinian state independence from the Trusteeship Council.
The socialists of Lemmy will decry this solution. They’ll call it colonialism and an example of Israeli and American imperialism. And it is. But it’s better than whatever shit-show is happening now. Israelis today will not accept a sovereign Palestinian state and will devote all their resources to destroy it. Organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah will not accept an Israeli state and will similarly continue to expend their resources to destroy. These are resources that could otherwise be used to rebuild Gaza and the West Bank and to make reparations for those whose lives were destroyed in this decades-long conflict.
Israelis see the situation in reverse—if they don’t beat the Palestinians to a pulp every single time without mercy, organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah will overrun Israel and do the same thing to them. It’s kind of like the reason why Japanese troops in World War II wouldn’t surrender to the Americans; they thought the Americans would treat Japanese POWs like how the Japanese treated American POWs.
Yep, I try to imagine which choices I would make if I grew up in Gaza, and there really isn’t a path where you don’t end up at least being sympathetic to Hamas in that environment. There’s no jobs, even in so called peace time you risk your home getting blown up randomly, food is rationed, there’s no way to leave and you don’t actually get to see the actual people that are keeping you locked up. Hard to not be sympathetic to the only ones that are fighting against that.
Israel made a peaceful solution impossible by continuing settlement expansion, financially supporting Hamas and continued murders, and no matter how many Hamas leaders they kill, as long as those conditions don’t change, more will spring up.
It’s funny that you think this is only between Israel and Palestinians.
This is a war between the US/western nations and Iran. It just happens to be occurring in Israel.
