Hamas has named Yahya Sinwar, the alleged mastermind of the deadliest attack in Israeli history, as its new overall leader. The move has further inflamed regional tensions, leaving Israel fuming.

Meanwhile, the Gaza war entered its 11th month on Wednesday.

Recall that Israel is bracing for a potential Iranian retaliation for the killing Sinwar’s predecessor, Ismail Haniyeh, last week in Tehran.

The Hamas leaders

This piece lists the top four other Hamas leaders who have been in Israeli cross-hairs for a long time.

Mohammed Deif or The Mastermind or The Cat with Nine Lives

Mohammed Deif leads the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military arm of the Hamas.

Palestinians call him The Mastermind, while to Israelis he is The Cat with Nine Lives.

Israel imprisoned him in 1989 and 2000.

Deif helped construct the notorious Gaza tunnels that allowed Hamas fighters to get inside Israel.

He has escaped several assassination attempts by Israel. This Hamas leader’s wife and two children died in one of such attempts.

Also, the many attempts on his life have left him blind in one eye, and cost him a leg and a hand. He has remained shadowy.

Khaled Meshaal

Khaled Meshaal, one of the founders of Hamas, was born in the West Bank in 1956.

In 2017, Hamas elected Ismail Haniyeh to succeed Meshaal as head of its political bureau. Meshaal then became head of the group’s political bureau abroad.

Earlier, in 1997, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, directed Israel’s Mossad to assassinate Meshaal, who was living in Jordan then.

The spies injected the Hamas leader with a toxic substance while he was walking along a street.

However, the Mossad spies were caught and the Jordanian authorities demanded the antidote to the poison.

Israel provided the antidote after the US President, Bill Clinton stepped into the matter.

Mahmoud Zahar

Born in 1945 to a Palestinian father and an Egyptian mother in Gaza, Mahmoud Zahar is one of Hamas’ most prominent leaders.

He schooled in Gaza and Cairo, worked as a doctor in Gaza and Khan Younis, until Israel dismissed him.

Mahmoud Zahar was held in Israeli prisons in 1988, and was among those deported to no-man’s land in 1992.

Israel dropped a bomb on his house in Gaza in 2003. He survived with injuries but his eldest son, Khaled, died.

Ismail Haniyeh

Until his death on July 31, Ismail Haniyeh was widely considered Hamas’s overall leader.

Israel imprisoned Haniyeh for three years in 1989, then exiled him to a no-man’s-land between Israel and Lebanon in 1992 along with other Hamas leaders.

After a year in exile, he returned to Gaza. In 1997 he was appointed head of the office of Hamas’s spiritual leader.

He was elected head of Hamas’s political bureau in 2017, and had lived in Qatar for the last several years.

Vanguard News