Day 383: Yahya Sinwar's life of resistance

At the start of this week’s livestream, we heard from Associate Editor Asa Winstanley about the police raid on his London home on 17 October, and the seizure of his electronic devices.

Police claim they are investigating social media posts under draconian laws that would be blatantly unconstitutional if they were applied in the United States.

Around 5:40 a.m., “we heard a very loud initial ringing of the doorbell, then banging on the door very insistently,” Asa recalled. “There were about 10 or so police officers … they took control of the house, and they took all my devices that I use for my journalism, took my computers, my phone, an old phone, iPad.”

The raid has been condemned by the UK’s National Union of Journalists. Winstanley and this writer thanked The Electronic Intifada’s readers and viewers for their outpouring of support since the police raid. As Winstanley’s legal team fights back, we will keep our audience informed and let them know how they can help.

This writer confirmed that The Electronic Intifada has engaged legal counsel in its own right in the UK, with instructions to do whatever they can “to prevent the British state from accessing any material on Asa’s devices that relates to the journalism of the Electronic Intifada.”

“We will do what we can to protect our sources, to protect our information as a matter of principle, to resist this attack on media freedom and to defend Asa’s rights, our rights and the rights of all journalists.”

Associate Editor Nora Barrows-Friedman’s news brief covered an intense week of Israeli atrocities across Gaza, the West Bank and in Lebanon, particularly what are being described as “death marches” in northern Gaza.

A life of resistance

The major focus of this week’s program was the killing of Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, at the hands of Israeli occupation forces near Rafah, southern Gaza, on 16 October.

What distinguishes Sinwar’s death at Israel’s hands from those of other major resistance leaders, including Sinwar’s predecessor Ismail Haniyeh, and Hizballah leader Hasan Nasrallah, is that he was not targeted for assassination.

Sinwar died as a fighter, armed with his own weapon, among his men, in the streets of Gaza. The Israelis did not even know they had killed him last Wednesday, until after the fact.

Sinwar was born in Gaza’s Khan Younis refugee camp, southern Gaza, in 1962, his family originally hailing from Majdal, renamed Ashkelon after its conquest by Zionist forces in 1948. He spent 20 years in Israeli prisons – sentenced to several life terms – but was released in a 2011 prisoner exchange.

While in prison, Sinwar wrote a novel, smuggled out and published in 2004, titled The Thorn and The Carnation.

The novel is “full of insight into how Sinwar saw the world and the perspective from which he built up the resistance movement,” according to an article for The Electronic Intifada by writer Justin Podur.

Podur is the author of Siegebreakers, a 2019 novel in which Palestinians in Gaza win a war of liberation. He runs The Anti-Empire Project podcast and YouTube channel, including the Gaza War SitRep series, with several videos on the military situation in Gaza and the larger region per week.

He told the livestream that the main character in the book is a fictionalized version of Sinwar himself, through which the author tries to convey to readers the qualities a person should possess if they want to resist – characteristics such as self-sacrifice, asceticism and security awareness.

In the wide-ranging discussion, Podur drew on Sinwar’s writing and interviews to address how the resistance leader might answer the question of whether the 7 October 2023 Al-Aqsa Flood operation had been a “miscalculation” – given Israel’s genocidal response.

We also discussed how people in the West, the imperial core, can and should act to try to bring pressure to bear to end the genocide.

The way in which Sinwar died, including the iconic video of his final defiant act of throwing a stick at the Israeli drone filming him, as he sat gravely injured in an armchair in a bombed out apartment, has had a rallying rather than demoralizing effect on the resistance and its supporters.

It could not have been further from Israeli claims that Sinwar would be hiding deep underground, shielding himself with Israeli captives.

In his resistance report, Jon Elmer took a close look at that video and provided a comprehensive look at Sinwar’s life, his role in building the resistance, and what is likely to be his legacy.

He also covered the ongoing battles in defense of Jabaliya in northern Gaza, and Lebanese resistance organization Hizballah’s operations on the northern front with Israel.

Resettling Gaza?

On Monday, hundreds of Israelis gathered for a conference near the boundary with Gaza, to promote the idea of sending Israeli settlers back to the coastal enclave.

One of the speakers, Israel’s national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, told the crowd “We are the owners of the land. And when we act like it, this is what brings results.”

He repeated his call for Gazans to “voluntarily” transfer to other countries because “that land belongs to us.”

In a 21 October editorial, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz warns, “This is the time to wake up and understand that these dangerous ideas have already penetrated deeply into the ruling party.”

“This is especially worrying because facts are becoming entrenched on the ground that perpetuate the army’s presence and develop the infrastructure for civilian settlement, such as roads and army bases,” the newspaper adds.

Palestinian human rights groups are raising the alarm about an Israeli scheme known as the General’s Plan. Spearheaded by Giora Eiland, a close advisor to defense minister Yoav Gallant, it aims at exterminating or expelling Palestinians in northern Gaza.

Israel denies it is implementing the plan, but even Western diplomats, staunch allies of Israel, are not persuaded.

“Contacts in the foreign ministry and defense ministry told us that explicitly this isn’t the plan, but it’s hard to be convinced when you examine the military’s actions on the ground,” one diplomat told Haaretz.

In our closing discussion we talked about whether Israel could really get away with resettling northern Gaza – especially since it is still facing fierce resistance all over the territory.

And if it can’t return its settlers to the so-called Gaza Envelope settlements outside Gaza, or to the areas near the Lebanon border, how could it possibly establish colonies inside the Strip?

There is no doubt that whatever Israel’s intentions are in northern Gaza, it is perpetrating mass extermination through massacres and starvation.

Tamara Nassar produced and directed the program and The Electronic Intifada’s Maureen Clare Murphy contributed writing and production. Michael F. Brown contributed pre-production assistance and Eli Gerzon contributed post-production assistance.

You can watch the program on YouTube, Rumble or Twitter/X, or you can listen to it on your preferred podcast platform.

Past episodes of The Electronic Intifada livestream can be viewed on our YouTube channel.