Sinwar Is Dead, but Hamas Will Survive

The death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is a watershed moment in the Israel-Hamas war and in the conflict roiling the broader Middle East, and many are rightly celebrating it. Sinwar not only personally oversaw the ruthless killing of more than 1,200 innocent Israelis during the attacks of October 7, 2023, but he also intentionally imperiled the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them women and children, who he knew would suffer and perish if Israel responded to the attacks in the way he expected. For Israelis and for Palestinian civilians who do not support Hamas, Sinwar’s demise is justice delivered.

But will it end Hamas? That has been Israel’s stated objective—to destroy the terrorist group so that Israel can restore deterrence and reestablish the safety of Israeli citizens. Hamas’s military capabilities have been badly damaged by Israel’s military campaign: the Israeli government claims that the Israel Defense Forces have killed more than 17,000 Hamas fighters out of a total of somewhere between 25,000 and 35,000. And Israel has also been laser-focused on hunting down Hamas leaders, seeking a decisive blow that would eliminate the threat the group poses.

This “decapitation” strategy—defeating a terrorist group by knocking out its leadership—can work. But in my research into the trajectories of 457 terrorist campaigns and organizations, stretching back 100 years, I have found that groups that end through decapitation tend to be small, hierarchically structured, and characterized by a cult of personality. They usually lack a viable succession plan and, on average, have been operating for less than ten years. Older, highly networked groups can reorganize and survive.

That is why, as I wrote earlier this year in Foreign Affairs, Hamas is not a good candidate for a decapitation strategy. It is a highly networked organization with an extreme political agenda that depends on international support and consciously plays to an international audience. It’s also a well-established group, more than 40 years old, and it maintains offices outside Gaza that will help it survive. It enjoys significant aid from Iran, and no state-supported terrorist group has ever ended only because its leader died. Simply put, Israel has killed the leader of Hamas in Gaza, but the group and its political agenda will likely survive.

HOW HAMAS PERSISTS

If Hamas were vulnerable to a decapitation strategy, it would probably have been defeated already. Israel has been assassinating Hamas leaders for decades—from the early killings of the bombmaker Yahya Ayyash (in 1996), the group’s founder Ahmed Yassin (in 2004), and his successor Abdel Aziz Rantisi (also in 2004) through the more recent killings this year of Saleh al-Arouri, Marwan Issa, Ismael Haniyeh, and Mohammed Deif, among others. But the group has not succumbed to that approach over the decades since its 1987 founding, and it will not do so now. Hamas is well practiced at successions, and the repeated pattern has been that the successor proved more extreme and dangerous than the original target was.

The killing of so many Hamas leaders in the last year had increased Sinwar’s standing within the group and enhanced his power. So it was indeed a very serious blow to the group when he died. And one of the interesting aspects of this killing is that Sinwar perished in a routine firefight, not a targeted killing—a fact that will burnish his image as a martyred fighter who died alongside his troops. Sinwar’s younger brother Mohammed is apparently poised to step into his role, and he will benefit from his famous brother’s standing.

No one is better at targeted killings than the Israelis, but the key question is whether the Netanyahu government has a political plan for mitigating the threat that the next generation of Hamas leaders will surely pose. Before his release in a hostage-for-prisoners swap in 2011, Sinwar had spent 23 years in an Israeli prison, nurturing a bitter vendetta against his captors that he put in motion when he masterminded the October 7 attacks. How many more future Sinwars have buried their parents, siblings, or children in Gaza? How many hungry and homeless Gazans, who lack employment or prospects beyond the criminal networks of Hamas, are now consumed by a desire for revenge?

Sinwar’s death could present a crucial opportunity to change the negative spiral currently underway in the region.

The source of Hamas’s strength is its narrative that it heroically resists Israeli aggression and authentically represents Palestinian interests. That narrative is blatantly false, but the Hamas view of Israel is gaining ground throughout the world and eroding political support for the country, including among younger voters in the United States, Israel’s closest ally. According to a recent Gallup poll, more Americans have negative views than positive ones of the Netanyahu government and the Israeli campaign in Gaza. The assassination of leaders is not an effective answer to a fundamentally political and strategic problem.

Nonetheless, Sinwar’s death could present a crucial opportunity to change the negative spiral currently underway in the region. Despite the dogged diplomatic efforts of the United States, Qatar, and Egypt, the situation has been escalating into the very regional war that diplomacy was designed to avert. Yahya Sinwar wanted to continue the war and was a primary obstacle to any agreement to end it. His assassination could result in a desirable political outcome if it convinces the Netanyahu government to find a political solution to the Israel-Hamas war, which is fueling the regional unrest. Doing so would mean aggressively pursuing an agreement in Gaza that would result in the return of the 101 Israeli hostages (both alive and deceased) and the delivery of robust humanitarian aid for Gaza’s civilians, many of whom are homeless, starving, and facing death.

The challenge, of course, is that now there is no one with whom to negotiate a cease-fire. By killing Sinwar, Israel has probably not only failed to defeat Hamas but has also made it more likely that it will have little choice but to continue its destructive and strategically aimless war in Gaza, a conflict that in the long run will feed the enmity among Palestinians that Sinwar exploited—and that those who will follow him will exploit, too.