False claims.. Hamas leaders appear alive after the occupation announced their assassination

The Israeli occupation army and intelligence agencies have often lied when announcing the "liquidation" of Hamas leaders, only to find out later, especially since the deal went into effect, that they were alive, which put the occupation in an embarrassing position confirming that much of what it promoted was merely allegations not based on facts.

The Hebrew newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reviewed, in its issue today, Wednesday, some cases, including the army’s announcement on December 3, 2023, of the killing of the commander of the Beach Battalion in the Qassam Brigades, Haitham al-Hawajri, but al-Hawajri appeared last Saturday at the ceremony to hand over the Israeli detainee, Kit Segal, and took pictures with his forces, and walked around freely without hiding his face.

This was at least the third time that a senior Hamas leader has appeared after the occupation claimed to have killed him. Officials in the Israeli army and the General Security Service (Shin Bet) acknowledged the “embarrassing” mistake, claiming that the statement issued a few months ago was based on intelligence that has now been shown to be wrong.

This was preceded by documentation last month of the commander of the Beit Hanoun Battalion in Hamas, Hussein Fayyad, at a funeral in the northern Gaza Strip, after the occupation army claimed to have killed him last May in Jabalia. At the time, the army spokesman announced that Fayyad was responsible for numerous plans to launch anti-tank missiles towards Israel during the war, as well as for firing mortar shells towards settlements north of the envelope.

Fayyad spoke at the funeral about "Gaza's victory over the Israeli army in the war." His words, according to the Hebrew newspaper, indicate that the video is recent and was filmed after the ceasefire. Regarding the return of the Beit Hanoun battalion commander, the occupation army and the "Shin Bet" also admitted that the intelligence information about his death as a result of an air strike was wrong.

A similar situation occurred with the commander of the Tel al-Sultan battalion in Rafah, Mahmoud Hamdan, who was also a bodyguard for Yahya Sinwar. Hamdan was killed in a confrontation with Israeli forces about 200 meters from where the Hamas leader himself was killed in September 2024. The Israeli army spokesman had previously announced that Hamdan and the rest of the Tel al-Sultan battalion leadership were killed in an airstrike. With the martyrdom of Sinwar, it became clear that the intelligence information was inaccurate, and Hamdan remained alive until he was martyred in another incident.

The newspaper quoted sources in the occupation army as saying: "It is possible that in the future we will see more Hamas leaders who we thought we had killed suddenly appear," adding: "Sometimes, even in Hamas, they do not know what happened in the results of a raid on their leader, and the process of examining the results of the raid is not always 100% accurate. Some were attacked inside tunnels or in homes that were destroyed with their inhabitants." During the war, the occupation army officially announced the killing of more than 100 senior Hamas leaders, from the level of faction, battalion and brigade leaders, as well as senior leaders, such as Mohammed Deif, Marwan Issa, and Yahya Sinwar.

However, the newspaper says, regardless of the embarrassing intelligence blunders discovered last month, Hamas still has senior commanders throughout the Strip who are central to rebuilding the movement, which continues to control Gaza in the absence of an alternative. In addition to Mohammed Sinwar, who appears to have succeeded his brother as Qassam commander, there are still senior field commanders alive, including at least two brigade commanders, Mohammed Shabana in Rafah and Izz al-Din Haddad in Gaza City.

According to the newspaper, it can be assumed that the higher the rank of the commander, the greater the number of bombs dropped on his location to ensure his death, and thus the greater the intelligence resources required to investigate the outcome of the raid. Based on this, the occupation did not rush to announce the results of the assassination attempts on senior Hamas and even Hezbollah leaders, and it usually took long days, even weeks, to complete the investigation process, as the resistance factions also did not quickly announce whether these leaders had been martyred.

In addition, many of the IDF commanders during the war criticized the almost “astronomical” numbers of resistance fighters, including field commanders, that the Israeli security services claimed were killed every day. Army sources told the newspaper: “They announced to the public that a brigade combat team killed about 60 terrorists (referring to resistance fighters) in Beit Lahia in a week, or 150 in Shujaiya, without full verification. When talking to lieutenants (in the army) and brigade commanders, they say that we saw their bodies with our own eyes, and the rest is from studied estimates.”

“There were also some Gazans, including unarmed ones, who were running in the street or in a combat zone where there were no civilians supposed to be, and we shot them, hit them, and saw them fall from a distance, assuming they were terrorists, and we added them to the list of dead without anyone checking their identity or even whether they were actually dead or just injured,” the sources added. Meanwhile, Israeli officials believe that on the eve of the ceasefire, Hamas had at least 10,000 armed and registered fighters left, out of the 30,000 it had as of October 7, 2023, some of them commanders, in addition to hundreds of new fighters who were hastily recruited and trained recently.

New Arab