“The Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas has announced that its leader Yahya Sinwar has been elected as head of the movement's political bureau,” Hamas said in a statement.
Sinwar is currently at the top of Israel's most wanted list. Israeli security agencies believe he planned and executed the October 7, 2023 attack, which killed more than 1,200 people and took 251 hostages to Gaza.
Hamas has not yet disclosed details of how the political bureau led by Sinwar would function.
The 61-year-old has not been seen in public since the October attacks and is believed to be hiding “on the 10th floor” in Gaza, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in June.
In the late 1980s, Sinwar founded Majid, a Hamas security agency that specifically targeted Palestinians who were alleged to have collaborated with Israel.
Shinwar spent most of his life in Israeli prisons, serving four life sentences following his third arrest in 1988.
However, he was one of 1,027 Palestinian and Israeli Arab prisoners released by Israel in 2011 in exchange for Israeli soldiers who had been held captive by Hamas for more than five years.
He later returned as a prominent Hamas leader and was appointed head of the Gaza Strip's political bureau in 2017.
The United States has placed Sinwar on its blacklist of “international terrorists.”
