The private TV channel Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation International, widely known as LBCI, on Thursday reported, citing sources, that Khaled Meshal has taken on the responsibilities of acting head of the terrorist group, overseeing all communications with significant stakeholders engaged in hostage and terrorist prisoners’ release negotiations.
The same sources also confirmed to LBCI that “Hamas leadership has informed Turkish, Qatari, and Egyptian officials of the death of its political bureau chief, Yahya Sinwar, during the Tel al-Sultan operation. Hamas stressed that following his assassination, negotiations for prisoner exchanges and ending the war would become increasingly difficult and more complex.”
Those sources have also verified to LBCI that the assassination of Sinwar, along with its implications for negotiations and a possible cease-fire, was a topic of discussion during a conversation between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani.
In other words, those sources are part of the Qatari government. Mashal has resided in luxurious accommodations in Doha, the capital of Qatar, since 2012.
According to MEMRI, Mashal’s most recent statement was made in Malaysia on October 7, 2024, in a speech marking the first anniversary of Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel, at the Kuala Lumpur Forum for Thought and Civilization. Mashal thanked Iran, the Houthis, Hezbollah, and the Iraqi militias for their assistance in the war against Israel; urged Muslims to wage jihad with their weapons and their lives and to open additional fronts against Israel; and called on Arab countries to support the people of Gaza financially “to ease their suffering.”
Mashal remarked that the losses sustained by the “Palestinian people,” including the tens of thousands of deaths, were merely “tactical,” while “the losses inflicted on the enemy are strategic.”
MEMRI cited Saudi businessman and blogger Monther Aal Sheikh Mubarak who tweeted, “Khaled Mashal says on video that the tens of thousands of dead and wounded, the hundreds of thousands of people displaced, the homes and mosques destroyed and the women widowed are ‘tactical losses.’ Imagine the residents of Gaza hearing that what happened to them is a tactical matter…”
Saudi influencer Abdullah Al-Tawila’i tweeted, “The man is crazy!! He says that the losses – 50,000 martyrs, the occupation of Gaza, its devastation – are just ‘tactical losses.’ By Allah, the Palestinians should capture him and put him on trial. How much contempt for their lives and their blood!!!”
Mashal published an op-ed headlined “We shall never recognize… a Zionist state on our soil” in the Los Angeles Times in 2006, right after Hamas had won the elections in Gaza and right before those Fatah representatives were deroofed from tall buildings in the Strip. He proclaimed:
Our message to the Israelis is this: We do not fight you because you belong to a certain faith or culture. Jews have lived in the Muslim world for 13 centuries in peace and harmony; they are in our religion “the people of the book” who have a covenant from God and his messenger, Muhammad (peace be upon him), to be respected and protected.
Our conflict with you is not religious but political. We have no problem with Jews who have not attacked us — our problem is with those who came to our land, imposed themselves on us by force, destroyed our society, and banished our people.We shall never recognize the right of any power to rob us of our land and deny us our national rights. We shall never recognize the legitimacy of a Zionist state created on our soil in order to atone for somebody else’s sins or solve somebody else’s problem.
But if you are willing to accept the principle of a long-term truce, we are prepared to negotiate the terms. Hamas is extending a hand of peace to those who are truly interested in a peace based on justice.
Alas, that op-ed and numerous other successful attempts at lulling the Israelis’ otherwise keen survival instincts have resulted in a 17-year war of attrition involving Hamas launching thousands of rockets at Israeli civilian centers, moderated every few years by short IDF incursions, until the final attack of October 7, 2023. Throughout that period, Mashal, like Sinwar and the rest of the Hamas leadership could care less about the losses of the very Arab brethren they pretended to protect.
But unlike Sinwar, the ascetic mass murderer who remained holed in Gaza, Mashal has been known for the life of luxury he enjoyed in Qatar, together with top-level Hamas bosses Ismail Haniyeh and Moussa Abu Marzuk. According to persistent reports, the three were worth some $11 billion. As illustrated in the tweet below.
Meet Maaz Haniyeh, the son of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. He, together with his brothers and father are hosted by Qatari ?? government in the most lavish hotels there. They’re not even hiding it (photo proudly posted by him ?)
Dying in Gaza is for peasants. pic.twitter.com/TsH6DMW3iq
— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) November 8, 2023
All of which suggests that Mashal’s appointment will not be very popular back home with the folks in Gaza. The other potential successor, Sinwar’s brother Mohammed Sinwar, has been accused of pedophilia. As David Wolpe put it succinctly:
I missed this on the pro Hamas signs at Harvard Yard: “Yahya Sinwar and his brother Muhammed have been accused of several acts of sexual assault, rape, and even, pedophilia, by Hamas members locked up with them.” https://t.co/d0Fx0zhh3e
— David Wolpe (@RabbiWolpe) February 22, 2024
Although if they were willing to accept Yahya’s special relationships with children, they should tolerate the same from Mohammed. The PLO folks have accepted the same from Yasser Arafat. And of course, there’s the prophet Mohammed himself, who married his wife Aisha when she was six and consummated the marriage when she was nine.
