Sinwar may have been killed, but Israel can’t kill legitimate resistance

Yahya Sinwar was killed by the occupation regime last week, and he is already a hero and a legend across the generations. His example is bound to inspire many others to follow his path of legitimate resistance against the apartheid state for the sake of Allah.

Sinwar was martyred on the battlefield after being wounded fighting the Zionist occupiers until his last breath. He did not hesitate to fight and did not surrender. He chose to be on the front lines with his loyal fighters facing, not running away from, his enemies. He was not hiding in tunnels when he was found, as the Zionists claimed; or in luxury hotels in a foreign country, directing affairs while his soldiers were being killed on the battlefield; or hiding behind civilians or the Israeli hostages.

A single image of Sinwar in his final moments exposed the Zionist propaganda and destroyed the fake narrative that their media had spread throughout a whole year of the genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. The same narrative is parroted by the media mouthpieces of the Zionist Arab regimes in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain which are loyal to the Zionist entity and hostile to the Palestinian resistance movements; indeed, hostile to all movements linked with political Islam and those who advocate resistance against the Zionist occupiers, regardless of their ideology.

This is not the image that the Zionists wanted of Sinwar’s end.

They hold him responsible for what happened on 7 October last year, and wanted desperately for him to be a humiliated prisoner, with his hands and feet tied and his eyes covered, led out of the tents of the displaced or from the shelters, taken by the occupation soldiers wherever they go. The so-called Israel Defence Forces boasted about killing Sinwar and rushed to circulate the pictures in order to gloat. In doing so, they deprived the military and political leadership of the opportunity to fabricate a false image of Sinwar’s death.

READ: Israel army faces shortage of ammunition amid war on Gaza, Lebanon

Furthermore, the Hamas leader was not assassinated in an operation based on intelligence. He was discovered by accident by a drone operator, and only because he was fighting on the front lines. When the Zionist soldiers noticed three Palestinian fighters entering a house, they fired a tank shell at them. When the soldiers tried to enter the house, Sinwar apparently threw two grenades at them and fought them. The soldiers were covered by tank shells and drones, which Sinwar fought with a stick after his right hand was injured. According to occupation sources, the skirmish lasted from 10am until 4pm on Wednesday, 16 October. The next day, the soldiers returned to comb the area, and rushed to share the picture of the man they suspected of being Sinwar.

While killing Sinwar can be considered an achievement for the occupation regime, it was a failure on another level. Not only because his martyrdom demonstrably crushed the false Israeli narrative and reinforced Sinwar’s presence in the Palestinian and Arab mind as a hero, but also because the occupation intelligence agencies were unable to determine his whereabouts for an entire year.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predictably celebrated Sinwar’s death, and repeated the propaganda about him being a man who imposed the war on his people and then hid himself away. The Israeli leader ignored both the context of legitimate resistance against a decades-old illegal occupation and video footage shared by Israel’s own soldiers, which showed him up to be the liar that he is.

So, let Netanyahu and his fellow fascists rejoice a little and cry a lot when they realise that they may have been able to kill Sinwar, but they can’t kill legitimate resistance against their oppressive military occupation.

One Sinwar has been killed, but how many more will follow in his footsteps?

Indeed, Sinwar was not the first Palestinian leader to be martyred in battle or killed treacherously by the Zionist forces. Sheikh Izzedine Al-Qassam was killed in the thirties, inspiring Hamas with the spirit of resistance; the movement named its military wing after him. Hamas founder and leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a quadriplegic, was assassinated with the utmost cowardice while in his wheelchair as he was leaving the dawn prayer in his local mosque. Then, weeks later, the occupation regime assassinated Sheikh Yassin’s successor as leader, Dr Abdul Aziz Al-Rantisi, as well as Yahya Al-Ayyash, the inventor of the movement’s rudimentary rockets. In July, Hamas political bureau head Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated while attending the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in Tehran.

None of these political murders weakened Hamas or the general spirit of resistance, and nor will they. The effort will continue until Palestine is liberated and free of Zionism.

I believe that killing Yahya Sinwar was not a victory for the Zionist state; it was a victory for the spirit of resistance, which will draw strength from him. As even Israeli officials have said, you cannot destroy an ideology, and nor can you destroy the “legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for their independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.” That is the exact wording of the 1977 Amendment Protocol of Protocol 1 of the Geneva Conventions as reaffirmed by the UN General Assembly in 1983.

The legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle is clear. Only those who are in thrall to the Zionists can’t see it.

OPINION: The IDF and ISIS are two sides of the same coin as agents of chaos in the Middle East

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.