The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday reported that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar ordered to reimplement suicide bombing attacks against Israelis during the summer amid the war in Gaza shortly before a terrorist attempted to carry out an attack of that nature in Tel Aviv. "the attack sent an unmistakable message," the Wall Street Journal wrote.
"Now is the time to revive suicide bombings," Sinwar said in a directive to a senior Hamas official according to an Arab intelligence source talking to the outlet.
“What a blessing it is that my bones become shrapnel that blow apart the usurping Zionist Jews,” Hamas terrorist Ja’far Sa’d Saeed Muna, who carried out the planned attack, said in a video later published by the Gazan terror group.
According to the outlet, such attacks were largely discontinued by Hamas in the last two decades, and some of its officials feared renewing them would turn the terror group into a "political paraiah." However, "Despite misgivings within Hamas, no one was willing to speak out against the practice once Sinwar was at the helm of the group," the Arab intelligence source told the outlet.
Footage of Ja’far Sa’d Saeed Muna before attempted attack in Tel Aviv
According to the Wall Street Journal, internal disagreements within Hamas have been present for years between some seeking the ultimate destruction of Israel via terror and those wishing to use these methods to acquire a legitimate political position for the ultimate goal of establishing a Palestinian state.
“Under Sinwar, Hamas can be expected to be a much clearer-cut, hard-line fundamentalist organization,” Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute think tank, told the Wall Street Journal.
The American outlet continued to detail the mounting differences between Sinwar and Hamas' previous politburo head Ismail Haniyeh who was eliminated by Israel back in July. According to the Wall Street Journal, the two bolstered the terror group's ties with Iran, but Haniyeh believed Sinwar failed to understand Hamas' need to portray a legitimate political image for the Palestinian people on the international stage.
The outlet added that while Haniyeh — who was present in Qatar alongside the rest of the group's politburo on October 7 — was aware of the planned massacre but was taken by surprise at its timing. "Hamas officials in Doha, while publicly praising the October 7 attack, began privately criticizing Sinwar as a 'megalomaniac,'" Arab and Hamas officials told the Wall Street Journal.
According to the report, Hamas’s political leadership started meeting with other "Palestinian factions in early December to discuss reconciliation and a postwar plan without consulting Sinwar," and added Haniyeh was open to an option of demilitarization of the terror group and a cease-fire agreement in Gaza, which Sinwar criticized as a “shameful and outrageous" move.
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