Israel is investigating the highly unlikely possibility that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is dead. Based on information from military intelligence. The Walla newspaper reports this, reporting at the same time that the Shin Bet has rejected the report and believes that Sinwar is alive. According to information from the intelligence services under investigation, Sinwar was killed during IDF operations in Gaza. “These are only hopes and assumptions based on the fact that Sinwar has been inaccessible in recent weeks,” an Israeli official told journalist Barak Ravid. However, according to analysts, it is unlikely that the attack on Lebanon will amount to an invasion. At least until November and until the US elections.
Hezbollah and the Israeli tank
Meanwhile, Hezbollah claims to have hit an Israeli Merkava tank on the border with Lebanon with a rocket. The soldiers aboard the vehicle “were killed or wounded. Our fighters used an anti-tank guided missile and the armored vehicle was hit directly,” the Iran-backed Shiite militia wrote on Telegram. Lebanese TV channel Al Mayadeen reported that the tank caught fire, killing two Israeli soldiers and wounding one. Meanwhile, state media reported that one soldier was lightly injured in a Hezbollah anti-tank missile attack.
The Israeli army, reports the Jerusalem Postsaid he could neither confirm nor deny reports of the possible death of the Hamas leader. Among the sources consulted by The Jerusalem Post, one senior source added fuel to the fire. While another said he had no real information on the matter, still others reported disagreements within the defense establishment.
The attacks
Israel and Hezbollah, from southern Lebanon, exchanged heavy attacks for hours with hundreds of missiles from both sides, residents of the southern Land of the Cedars and citizens of the Haifa area and northern Israel. In the afternoon, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu provided the first official information on the hostages still in Gaza, saying that intelligence reports show that “half are still alive.”
So far, the army has declared 35 of the 101 hostages held captive in the Gaza Strip dead, so perhaps 33 were taken alive. Overnight, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shelled a school compound in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. The Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that at least three people were killed and several others wounded in the raid, and that the Khaled bin Al-Walid school had been turned into a center for displaced people.
The Analyst and Israel's War
Giuseppe Dentice, head of the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) desk at the Center for International Studies, told National newspaper that there is “a real risk that we are facing a new escalation of the ongoing war. But in reality, there are no simple answers to a complex equation. If we take the statements at face value, we are heading towards an escalation. But words are one thing and the concrete interests of the actors involved are another.” Indeed: “Israel has no real advantage in a ground operation that would be very costly in every sense of the word, but it could want to corner Hezbollah, by threatening it with an intervention that Tel Aviv does not really want, to force it to stop the conflict. It is a game of poker.”
The American elections
The most likely hypothesis is therefore that Israel will stagnate at least until the American elections: “Israel fears going too far with Hezbollah and then finding itself exposed in the event of a Harris victory. But it must also be said that Netanyahu is not sure that the much-vaunted total support promised by Trump will then materialize into total support for an Israeli operation on Lebanese soil that would risk triggering a wider war that would require American intervention.” And the same goes for the truce in Gaza: “Both sides do not want an agreement now.”
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