Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Saturday that Hamas was alive and will survive despite the death of its leader Yahya Sinwar in an Israeli military operation in Gaza.
Sinwar was the architect of the October 7, 2023 invasion and slaughter in southern Israel, when some 3,000 Hamas-led terrorists burst through the Gaza border and massacred some 1,200 people in their homes, communities and at a music festival, and abducted 251 to Gaza, where 97 are still held hostage from that day.
He was killed by IDF troops in Gaza’s Rafah on Wednesday.
“His loss is certainly painful for the resistance front” against Israel, “but it will not end at all with the martyrdom of Sinwar,” Khamenei said.
“Hamas is alive and will remain alive,” he said in a statement.
Sinwar “was the shining figure of resistance and struggle,” Khamenei said in his first remarks on Sinwar since he was killed on Wednesday. Iran is Hamas’s chief backer and the Palestinian terror group is one of several proxies that Tehran has deployed against Israel.
“He stood with unwavering determination against the cruel and aggressive enemy and slapped them with tact and courage,” he added. “He left behind the irreparable blow of October 7, 2023 as his legacy in the history of this region, and then he soared with honor and pride to the ascension of the martyrs.”
Israel has also killed the top leadership of Iran’s main arm in the region, Hezbollah. Tehran is also bracing for an Israeli response to the missile attack that Iran launched at Israel earlier in the month in the wake of the killing of Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah.
Hamas itself also vowed Sinwar’s death would not mean victory for Israel, and would not ease Hamas’ conditions for a cease-fire and hostage release deal.
The hostages “will not return… unless the aggression against our people in Gaza stops,” Khalil al-Hayya, deputy leader of Hamas’s Qatar-based politburo, said.
In a video statement Friday, the senior Hamas leader said Israel would come to regret killing Sinwar, adding that his “martyrdom” would only strengthen the terror group.
Hamas’s armed wing vowed, in its own statement, to keep fighting Israel until the “liberation of Palestine,” as it mourned the death of the group’s chief.