By Nidal al-Mughrabi
CAIRO (Reuters) – Marwan Issa, the elusive Hamas commander mentioned by the U.S. to have been killed by Israel, had survived earlier assassination makes an attempt to spend years masterminding incursions into Israel together with the Oct. 7 assault that triggered the Gaza warfare.
“Brother Issa is the strolling nightmare of the enemy,” one Hamas supply advised Reuters, lauding his paramilitary abilities.
In response to U.S. nationwide safety adviser Jake Sullivan, Issa died in an Israeli operation final week.
Neither Israel nor Hamas have confirmed that.
Issa, nicknamed the “shadow man” by fellow Palestinians for his capacity to remain off the enemy’s radar, had risen to No. 3 throughout the Islamist militant group.
He and the opposite two prime Hamas leaders shaped a secretive three-man navy council atop Hamas. They deliberate the Oct. 7 assault and are believed to have been directing navy operations from the tunnels and backstreets of Gaza since.
Some 1,200 folks had been killed and about 253 taken hostage on Oct. 7, in line with Israeli tallies, the bloodiest assault in Israel’s 75-year historical past.
In its wake, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s authorities vowed to kill the three: Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ chief in Gaza, Mohammed Deif, head of the navy wing, and Issa his deputy.
Issa’s demise can be a significant blow to Hamas, which has confronted a relentless Israeli air and land marketing campaign to destroy it, pulverising its Gaza Strip stronghold and killing almost 32,000 folks in line with Palestinian authorities.
His killing may additionally complicate efforts to safe a ceasefire and hostage releases, though Israel says talks are ongoing by means of Egyptian and Qatari mediators.
Requested about studies of his demise, the Hamas supply mentioned they may very well be Israeli psychological warfare. He added that Issa had helped construct Hamas’ navy capabilities together with rockets.
In response to Hamas sources, Issa discovered survival abilities from Deif, who survived seven Israeli assassination makes an attempt, leaving him disfigured and utilizing a wheelchair.
HOMES DESTROYED, SON KILLED
Issa, who was born in 1965, was on Israel’s most-wanted record and was injured in a 2006 assassination try throughout a gathering with Deif.
Israeli warplanes additionally destroyed his home twice throughout invasions of Gaza in 2014 and 2021, killing his brother.
Issa’s son, a daily Hamas supporter, was killed by an Israeli airstrike within the central Gaza Strip in December.
The US labelled Issa a “Specifically Designated World Terrorist” in September 2019.
Like Deif, his options had been unknown to the general public till 2011 when he appeared in a bunch photograph taken throughout an change of prisoners with Israel which he helped to organise.
Palestinian sources have speculated the three prime Hamas leaders have been hiding in lengthy, complicated tunnels beneath the enclave however they may very well be anyplace in Gaza, probably the most densely populated spots on this planet.
Issa, maybe the least well-known of the three, has been concerned in lots of Hamas’ main choices of current years. All three had been born into refugee households that had fled or been expelled in 1948 from areas within the newly created Israeli state.
All have spent years in Israeli prisons, Issa for 5 years from 1987.
Sinwar served 22 years after being jailed in 1988 for the kidnapping and killing of two Israeli troopers and the homicide of 4 Palestinian collaborators.
He was essentially the most senior of 1,027 Palestinians that Israel freed in 2011 in change for one in all its troopers, Gilad Shalit, captured by Hamas in a cross-border raid 5 years earlier.
Issa was amongst Hamas leaders who negotiated that.
Gerhard Conrad, a German Intelligence Company mediator (BND) from 2009 to 2011, was among the many few to have met Issa whereas negotiating Shalit’s prisoner swap.
“He was very meticulous and a cautious analyst: that is my impression of him. He knew the information by coronary heart,” Conrad advised Al Jazeera tv.
Hamas’s secular rival, the Palestinian Authority, detained Issa and several other different militants in reference to Hamas suicide assaults inside Israel in 1997.
Israel has killed Hamas’ leaders up to now, together with the group’s founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and its former chief Abdel-Aziz al-Rantisi, assassinated in a 2004 air strike.
New commanders rose to fill their ranks.
(Extra reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi; Writing by Michael Georgy and Ahmed Elimam; Enhancing by William Maclean and Andrew Cawthorne)
