The Israeli army's chief of staff, Herzi Halevi, vowed today to "find" the new leader of the Islamist group Hamas, Yahya Sinuar, and eliminate him, in a statement released a day after he was appointed to head the Palestinian movement.
"We will intensify our efforts to find him, attack him and ensure that they (Hamas leaders) will once again have to replace the leader of the political bureau" of the organization classified as terrorist by Israel, declared Halevi.
Sinuar, Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip for seven years, was appointed leader of the Islamist movement on Tuesday, succeeding Ismail Hanyieh, who was assassinated last week in Tehran in an attack blamed on Israel.
Speaking to air force fighter pilots, Halevi joked about Sinuar's change of position.
"The [new] political position doesn't change anything about the fact that this is a murderer responsible for the planning and execution of what happened on 7 October, so this change of title not only doesn't stop us from looking for him, it encourages us," he said.
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz had already declared on Tuesday evening that Yahya Sinuar had to be "quickly eliminated".
The Israeli army and authorities accuse Yahya Sinuar of being one of the masterminds of the unprecedented Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, making him one of Israel's most wanted men.
On that day, Hamas militia elements infiltrated southern Israeli territory and killed 1,194 people, most of them civilians, and hours later Israel declared war on the Gaza Strip to "eradicate" the Palestinian Islamist movement.
In power in Gaza since 2007 and classified as a terrorist organisation by the United States, the European Union and Israel, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) also took 251 hostages that day, 111 of whom remain in captivity and 41 of whom have died in the meantime, according to the latest Israeli army report.
The war, which entered its 306th day today and continues to threaten to spread to the entire Middle East region, has so far left at least 39,677 dead and 91,645 wounded in the Gaza Strip, as well as around 10,000 missing, most of them civilians, presumably buried in the rubble after ten months of war, according to updated figures from the local authorities.
The conflict has also caused more than two million displaced people, plunging the overcrowded and impoverished Palestinian enclave into a serious humanitarian crisis, with more than 1.1 million people in a "catastrophic famine" that is claiming victims - "the highest number ever recorded" by the UN in studies on food security in the world.
