Hamas uses Sinwar’s final moments as backdrop for hostage releasepublished at 07:15 Greenwich Mean Time
Paul Adams
Reporting from Kfar Saba near Tel Aviv
Image source, Getty Images
A giant poster to the left of the stage in Khan Younis, where the hostages are due to be handed over to the Red Cross, is full of potent imagery.
It shows a rear view of the former Hamas military chief, Yahya Sinwar, sitting in a dusty red armchair in a room full of rubble, looking out through the shattered wall of the room where he was killed by Israeli gunfire last October.
The stylised image draws on the footage of Sinwar’s final moments, released by the Israeli military.
In the poster, Sinwar is seen staring out through the hole in the wall at a silhouette of a man holding the Palestinian flag, standing in front of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock.
The mixture of Palestinian iconography, old and new, is powerful. Sinwar’s death, it defiantly says, was a necessary sacrifice on the path towards national liberation.
A former Israeli official messaged me this morning to say it was a mistake for Israel to have released the footage of Sinwar’s death.
“It raised him to a mythical status,” he said.
Together with the now familiar images of heavily armed militants from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, parading at another handover ceremony, it’s all part of a concerted effort by the gunmen to say that they are still a force to be reckoned with.