Why Netanyahu won’t let Israel stop fighting after killing Hamas’s Sinwar

Beirut, Lebanon – Israeli forces killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in combat on Wednesday in a surprise shootout in Rafah.

The news raised some hopes among Western commentators that the killing may be an opening for an end to the ongoing war in Gaza or even to the broader Israel-Palestine conflict.

However, analysts told Al Jazeera, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would seek other pretexts to keep his country at war for personal gain and to further an Israeli expansionist dream of expelling the Palestinians and maintaining an indefinite occupation of their lands.

Netanyahu’s fears

Netanyahu has long feared losing power due to the possibility that he could spend multiple years behind bars.

In 2019, he was charged in three separate cases: fraud, bribery, and breach of trust. If convicted, he risks spending up to 10 years in prison.

According to the accusations, Netanyahu offered favours and gifts to media tycoons in exchange for positive press.

A year later, Netanyahu was elected prime minister for a fifth term. His far-right parliamentary coalition quickly proposed laws that would undermine the country’s judiciary by allowing the government to appoint judges, limit the court’s oversight and even override the court.

Meanwhile, International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan has requested an arrest warrant for Netanyahu and his Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for atrocities they have overseen in Gaza.

“[Netanyahu] will look for another pretext, or for another person, to continually go after. That will only breed more insecurity, which is what he wants,” said Diana Buttu, an analyst on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

“He wants to make Israelis believe that they are under a state of siege or war … That’s his way of controlling them and staying in power,” she told Al Jazeera.

That Netanyahu seems to chase escalation was apparent on Saturday after a Hezbollah drone reportedly attacked his home in Caesarea.

However, Netanyahu said the attack was by “Iran’s agents”, a deflection that some analysts see him laying the groundwork for widening the war further to include Iran, well beyond the Gaza Strip and the Lebanese group.

‘Locked in a permanent conflict’

In October last year, Israel launched its war on Gaza, killing more than 42,000 people and uprooting nearly the entire population of 2.3 million. And the death of Sinwar – Israel’s “number one enemy” – is unlikely to stop it.

“I don’t believe the death of Sinwar changes Israel’s calculations in terms of Netanyahu’s desire to proceed with the destruction and depopulation of the Gaza Strip,” said Omar Rahman, visiting fellow on Israel-Palestine for the Middle East Council on Global Affairs think tank in Doha.

Israel’s war against the civilians of Gaza began in ostensible response to a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, during which 1,139 people were killed in Israel and about 250 were taken captive.

Gaza had already been suffering since an Israel-imposed siege on it in 2007, with the standard of living deteriorating to the point where international observers and world leaders soon began to refer to it as “the world’s largest open-air prison”.

Israel had just ended its physical occupation of Gaza in 2005 – withdrawing its military presence and vacating the illegal settlements that Israeli settlers had moved into. But the move had little to do with conceding territory and eventually statehood to Palestinians.

Israel’s then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon simply believed that the Israeli settlers in Gaza were surrounded by far too many Palestinians, making them a burden on the security establishment. He preferred to pull out of Gaza and focus on settlement expansion in the West Bank.

This was not exceptional as Israel has historically obstructed political solutions that would bring about a fully sovereign Palestinian state,  Yezid Sayigh, an expert on Israel-Palestine and the Middle East for the Carnegie Middle East Center think tank in Beirut, told Al Jazeera.

“Israel has assassinated many Palestinian leaders before and it will continue doing that. Nothing has ever changed because, fundamentally, successive Israeli governments – even under Labour, not just Likud – have been unwilling to cede territory or cede genuine Palestinian sovereignty,” he said.

“The result: [Israel] has locked itself into permanent conflict and they have continued all this time to prefer military responses because they put themselves into a position where there are no political solutions,” he added.

Netanyahu appears to be continuing that trend.

On Friday, he said Israel must continue its war on Gaza to “rescue the remaining Israeli captives” and on Lebanon, against which Israel has opened another front in an ostensible attempt to “dismantle Hezbollah and restore security in northern Israel”.

Since October 7, Netanyahu has obstructed numerous ceasefire attempts despite ostensible pressure from his main patron, the United States.

On July 31, Netanyahu even ordered his security forces to assassinate Hamas’s political chief – and main negotiator for a ceasefire – Ismael Haniyeh during his visit to Iran, where he attended the inauguration of President Masoud Pezeshkian.

Israeli political commentator Oren Ziv said the latest killing of Sinwar emboldens Israel’s far right, who have continued to support Netanyahu’s calls to achieve “total victory” in Gaza, behaving, he said, like “drug addicts”.

“The death of Sinwar is a dose for now, but it won’t satisfy the right-wing public or the government [in the long term]. They are looking for more killing and more war,” he told Al Jazeera.

No lessons learned

In March 2004, Israel assassinated Hamas founder and spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was a quadriplegic, firing three missiles at him as he left a mosque near his home in Gaza after prayers.

Before he died, Ahmed Yassin had called for a cold peace with Israel, which would be conditioned on Israel withdrawing its troops from Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

Israel’s response was to try to destroy Hamas by assassinating Ahmed Yassin and other Palestinian leaders.

The approach backfired as Hamas won a sweeping majority in Palestine’s last legislative elections in January 2006, recalls Buttu.

“Hamas ended up becoming even stronger than they were [when Ahmed Yassin was alive],” she told Al Jazeera.

“Over time … more people recognise that [Israel] can try to kill the resistance leaders, but it will never kill the resistance,” she added.

Rahman, from the Middle East Council, echoes the view that Hamas will continue to survive the ongoing war despite being severely degraded.

“Organisationally speaking, [killing Sinwar] further degrades Hamas from a leadership and operational standpoint. But the organisation is intact … it has fighters that operate in cells without centralised leadership,” he told Al Jazeera.

Irrespective of whether Hamas survives, Palestinian resistance will persist in some form, added Rahman.

Noting that armed struggle is rooted in the suffering that Palestinians have endured from Israel’s entrenched occupation, Buttu and Rahman said the total destruction of Gaza by Israel would only compound Palestinian grievances.

“The underlying grievances [of Palestinians] are not being addressed … therefore the resistance to Israeli dispossession will continue,” Rahman told Al Jazeera.

“It’s as simple as that. That’s the simple equation.”