Yahya Sinwar’s life and final battle, with Jon Elmer

we will start the resistance report as ever in Rafa and this week starting in Rafa is particularly important because it was the site of Yahya sinar's death uh fighting as a fighter um we can see here the map of the Gaza Strip in the resistance report today we're going to cover from Rafa through conun uh up through the narim corridor which is still being targeted every single day um and then we're going to focus on the north of course in jabalia uh and the jabalia refugee camp which is not on this map but the jabalia refugee camp is just south of jabalia balad the city um and it forms essentially a contiguous population center from the north of jabalia all the way through the refugee camp and into the city uh of Gaza City um and to the South is the beach refugee camp the shatti refugee camp this is a continuous strip of um city if you were to be driving as say a foreign journalist from Toronto on his first trip you wouldn't know uh I didn't know when I was leaving jabalia and entering uh Gaza City you don't necessarily I mean you can tell the refugee camps of course um and the downtown core of Gaza City is is a major Metro uh Metropolis so that's obvious to tell but I'm just saying the the the demarcations of these they're fighting in jabalia they're fighting in Gaza City the lines bleed uh um literally and figuratively across those borders so um just just to say that when we get to jabalia but we're going to start in Rafa because uh we've been talking about Rafa for the last five and a half months I've given you guys every single week on this show all the details necessary to understand what is going on uh along the Philadelphia Corridor where Israel is a attempting to set up and hold the terrain to lock in the Gaza Strip the way they were working on the tunnels and the way that a week two weeks ago 18 days ago uh up and left in the middle of the night the 162nd Brigade uh division um took the brigades that were in uh Rafa and moved them up to The Siege on jabalia and in doing so they left behind just a small uh division with one Brigade that is a training Brigade but this is what they have done to Rafa let's look at these these next few pictures these were put together uh through satellite imagery collected by Evan Hill uh who works at the Washington Post don't blame him for that um but yeah does solid open source uh geospatial work and you could just see like you can't even really describe this it's like you took a physical eraser and just destroy destroyed the entire Society of Rafa the refugee camps are just eliminated the destruction is total um and you're going to see that in the situation with sinir senoir was 150 M away from an Israeli military Outpost that the training uh Brigade was situated at he was 150 M from there that post is 800 M from the Egyptian border um and so you're talking about the Philadelphia Corridor is the story this area that we've talked about on this show week after week for six months ends up becoming the place where Yahya sinir is he's meeting with commanders he's in a tactical vest he's got weapons uh we'll get more into that um but let's show the footage that that everybody has seen at this point the Israelis released this footage of this drone entering the building that had already been tank shelled and looking around if you look dead center you can see sitting in the chair which is symbolic already because Yahya senoir sat in a chair in his demolished house in 2021 and that became an iconic picture you can look at him here with his arm TNI um because the bottom half of his arm has been blown off uh you can see he's got his face covered with a makeshift CFA and you can see he's holding a stick um and he's gonna pick this stick up and throw it at the Drone that's hovering here the Israelis are in with the Drone because when they came with their force uh senoir threw two grenades at them and they ran away they broke contact is the military term broke contact uh to to tell you that in Lay terms they ran away um they didn't they have no interest in fighting uh in any kind of face-to-face combat even with somebody who's been just hit by a tank shell so they break contact they go back to their Outpost 150 meters away and they fly this drone to see if the person where the person in the building is and they see this person they have no idea who they're looking at here the reason why the training Brigade in in the Army for nine months a platoon Commander training uh school um is going here with a drone from that Outpost they have no idea who they're killing here um And when they see senoir throw the stick at them um they do what Israel does they called in a tank shell um and fired a tank shell and dropped the house on top of senoir that happened at 3:00 in they first see him I'll just go through the whole story at 10:00 a.m. on the day before his death was announced his death was announced on the 17th he was killed on the 16th in the middle of the afternoon at 10:00 a.m. in the morning from their Outpost flying drones this training unit sees movement they don't see Fighters they see movement and because Rafa is supposed to be depopulated flattened their genocidal Army sees people moving and immed immediately fires tank shells at them that's how Israel behaves they bury the building and they move on with their day that's what they did in this case too they buried senoir in the building they dropped the roof on top of him and they went back to the base in the middle of the afternoon uh never filed a report never told uh you know the shabbach that they um killed maybe a senior leader or or even bothered to find out who that leader is which is something that fits with Israeli um tactics throughout this war they don't do battle damage assessments um but they happen to do a battle damage assessment uh um a sensitive site exploitation is how other militaries call it basically where you go back to the Target that you hit and you see who you killed and you attempt to get intelligence from that strike and Israel doesn't do that and that's why every single uh Commander that they say they kill they offer no evidence for it at all including by the way the commander of the Tes suan uh Battalion that was with Yahya sinir um Mahmud Haman Israel told us they killed Mahmud hamdan in September they didn't do a battle damage assessment they didn't go and look they just tell you yeah we we killed this person we killed Muhammad Dave uh we killed marwin Isa there's no proof of that Kasam has not acknowledged their deaths Kasam has acknowledged the deaths of leading figures um and so this story is just remarkable it's a complete accident that it's sinir it's uh the the likelihood of this attack just dropping the building on him and him becoming one of the 12 or 13,000 people that are buried in rubble that nobody can get out from the rubble uh because Israel doesn't allow heavy Machinery to operate they blow it all up as we've seen that's why people are digging with their hands to try to get people out so the extreme unlikelihood of Israel actually finding sinir and you can see him there in in that Freeze Frame he sitting upright in his chair he's got his arm TNI he's sitting defiantly in the chair with his face covered he's in a tactical vest he's holding weapons he's holding grenades which he threw at the force he's holding an AK-47 and he's holding a Glock pistol and the Glock pistol that he's holding is the Glock pistol that was captured by Kasam and presented to senoir in 2018 during a very consequential uh foiled Kasam raid U sorry uh Sarat Mall raid Israeli Special Forces raid that was attempting a clandestine operation to uh penetrate Gaza um and to plant listening devices to try to get into the closed Network that Kasam under sino's leadership uh perfected to have a closed Network that the Israelis can't get intelligence not like Hezbollah um where Israel announced the names of the Hezbollah commanders and Hezbollah confirms the names we don't have any confirmation of any senior command commanders except for two Iman nol who is the central U Middle camps uh Commander division Commander uh and Ahmed gandur who was the northern uh division Commander those are the only two confirmed um kills in battle that Israel has had um and that Kasam has claimed they claimed the senoir death the next day but this is happening in the middle of the afternoon the day before Israel announces is it and it's just um the fact that it's an accident the fact that it's not that it wasn't because of Any failing of the resistance in fact what you have here is the head of the pollet bureau although he is a cassam brigade's founder and was the founder of the Majid the the internal security system that Hamas uh built that became ultimately part of the cassam Bri Gades he's a military man sinir um but he's the poit bureau head of Hamas he's the overall head of Hamas and we see him in a battle destroyed area communicating one-on-one with commanders of those battalions and it opens up so many questions about where senoir who we were told was hiding in a tunnel uh surrounded by captives which we all on this show always said was a lie um because we know that he met with the captives on his first day on the captives first day on October 7th sinir went in his perfect Hebrew and spoke to the captives and he said to the CI civilians he said um we'll take care of you we you know you're in I promis to take care of you you're in our hands you're our guests you'll go home in the next day or two that's what sinir told um told the captives after October 7th and now we see him on the front lines 150 meters from an Israeli position communicating with the important Battalion commanders um fighting as a soldier and Israel released this video thinking that they had shown uh a success which is just it's so absurd I can't help but laugh because the entire world saw this video and this video is going to be iconic for generations of Palestinian struggle sinir has now set the bar are for leadership of the Palestinian national movement so high that you have to fight to the last uh moment with the anything that you have in your hand with a stick even when your arm has been blown off you reach for a stick you sit up in the chair upright in the exact same way as his iconic photo when they destroyed Israel destroyed his house in 2021 um there's just so many elements of this story that are failures for the Israelis failures for the Americans who have poured tens of billions of dollars into this war they have their own uh American Military and Intelligence Officers embedded within the Israeli trying to get any kind of signals intelligence human intelligence and they failed they never have any idea where senoir is but senoir is communicating he's doing the ceasefire talks uh he's writing letters once he became the overall head of the poet Bureau after the assassination of ish hania he's writing letters to the ansar movement he's writing letters to nasrala and to um to Hezbollah and so he is doing everything the Israelis uh could couldn't find him doing in part because of what Justin said because he's lived this life of security um that puts operational security as the primary concern for a resist istance Fighter um and he implemented that on the ground for the Palestinians and the fact that he is holding the gun the gun is captured from one of those Israeli Special Forces who tried hidden as Palestinians dressed up as Palestinians to come into Gaza um and plant listening devices because Israel knew as far back as 2018 that they had no they did not have a line in on on Cam's Communications they were completely dark and that is a critical element of the war that we've been watching for the last 385 days including October 7th that took Israel by surprise in such a fundamental way um that it left them reeling um that was because of operational security that came from senoir that came from prison where he was a prison leader um and elected those are it's an elected job the prisoners elect senoir to be the prison leader and he teaches you know when he came out in the he was released in the gillad Shalit prisoner exchange which was a crossborder operation executed by his brother Muhammad um to capture the tank Gunner and bring him back into Gaza um during that prisoner exchange um sinir said that he didn't want to be part of the prisoner Exchange that he wanted to stay in the prison he wanted his other uh comrades to get out before him that was his disposition and ultimately that didn't happen because the prisoners said no you're going uh you're going out and when he got out the first thing he said was uh Israel thought that prison was my grave but it was my University and he immediately set about after 2011 as soon as he arrived in Gaza he said I promised everyone that was left behind in prison that we will get them out that we will free them and he also makes consistent uh analogies between gaza's Siege and a prison environment to liberate uh Gaza to break the siege um is a prison break and that's a term that became uh commonly used to describe the October 7 operation was that it was a Prison Break um and so the connections between those the fact that he throwing grenades at Israeli soldiers that Israeli soldiers run away send drones and then follow up with another tank shell that kills him after this still photo I made here of him um they dropped a tank shell and dropped the house uh and killed him he was killed as if he was any other fighter and in from the Palestinian side he was just any other fighter and that's what made him a leader that will go down in history um for what he did and this video that the Israelis showed um which they believed that just shows how disconnected they are from all of this um from their genocide that they believe that this was a a win for them um when really you just have every single solitary child in all of Palestine acting this scene out already you can just imagine it uh all over Janine in the north all the way down um you know to the internally displaced all over Gaza that the kids see this um and and what this does for their morale to see their leader fighting from the front advancing uh from the front he didn't try to get away he didn't try to run away once he was engaged in contact by the Israelis he fought uh and he fought with a weapon that was captured from an Israeli Special Forces Soldier and was presented to senoir you may recognize the gun from from um some famous speeches of sinir when he's speaking on the stage um and the one time in 2011 when he says uh to Israel if you want to assassinate me I'm I'm about to walk home uh I'm leaving in 10 minutes and he stands on the stage and he tucks the gun in his pants with the silencer that's the gun that was captured in this 2018 foiled raid that Counter Intelligence operations of Kasam of the sort that were in the 1980s sinar's job within the movement before Hamas was Hamas and as Justin said when Hamas was seen as being slow to form um sinir is in jail in the early to mid 80s before Hamas exists he meets Salah shahada who's the founder of the Kazam brigades he is a follower of shik Ahmed Yasin um and so he gets the most important portfolio which is internal security the the Palestinian Revolution cannot function if there's collaborators working with the Israelis amid their people and between the years of him going to jail in the 1980s um and the uh to the October 7th operation Palestinians virtually entirely cleared collaborators um and made it a nonf factor uh in their resistance and that's something that senoir um began that that was a project that began with senoir ultimately senoir is arrested in uh at the beginning of the first inata in 1988 he's actually arrested in Janine he's not arrested in Gaza he's arrested in Janine where he's moving through the West Bank setting up the cells the underground cells that would become the cassam brigades he's setting up those cells um Israel arrests him for for basically for petty um for activism for uh throwing stones for being in demos um they don't arrest him because they think he's The Mastermind of setting up the cassam Bri Gades and so he's in prison on on small charges um and once the inata starts to take shape and the camb brigades start to emerge as underground cells and that rise up um from the underground and capture Israeli soldiers in order to exchange them for prisoners who are in uh Israeli jails the lynchpin of the Palestinian national movement um of the Armed struggle is to capture Israeli soldiers and exchange them for Palestinian prisoners so once Israel realizes that this has happened that Kasam has built these underground networks that's when senoir is then retried he's retried and given multiple life sentences he's tried for uh operations that he was said to have planned or that existed uh even when he was in prison um Israel does that with all the leaders that's how you have sentences of 17 life sentences they give leadership um they take that all the numbers of the killed or captured soldiers and they just tack it onto their file uh and sinir was that way so even Israel themselves didn't know sinir uh was the man that he was when he was arrested um so that's an an interesting fact and when he's released from prison as I said in the galad Shalit galad Shalit is captured in 2006 the prisoner exchange is in 2011 he comes out of prison and immediately joins the Hamas poit Bureau he becomes effectively the defense minister who's in charge of the cassam brigades um and when in 2017 he's elected all these positions are elected he's elected in 2017 as the overall uh head of Hamas in Gaza uh in in 2017 when he's uh at that point he is the key bridge between the Hamas movement the political movement and the Kasam brigades the armed Wing which uh is much more popular than Hamas um within Palestinian Society and a natural bridge that he took from defense minister you know he didn't come out of prison first of all before he came out of prison Israel said you all have to sign in the Shalit deal you all have to sign this paper that says you won't go back to resistance activities and sinir said no we're not signing that and as the leader in the prison uh sinir said we're not signing that and so nobody signed it and and as the prisoner exchange was happening Israel was really upset about that because they saw it as a big loss that they couldn't get these guys to sign away uh that they would go into retirement and you know senoir wanted to live a life um maybe wanted to go into retirement but did the exact opposite he took the portfolio of the most important resistance movement within the National Liberation struggle um and he worked to align them with the Hamas movement when he first came out of prison he wanted immediate medely reconciliation between fata and Hamas he was a key player in the 2004 prisoners document which was attempting to do that reconciliation um especially after the and Then followed on by the coup attempt by the US um and Israel to overthrow the Hamas government in Gaza um so those elements of his story are a critical part of the trajectory of the National Liberation struggle that you see today that culminates in October 7th October 7th is a Yahya sinir operation it's not that nobody else in Hamas would have done that operation um but his leadership allowed the uh connection between Hamas and Kasam um and to to have an agreement on a strategy um which he took very seriously he was a student of Israeli Society Israeli military intelligence um Israeli military uh strategy itself um and he in the you know in the sunu sense of know your enemy know yourself he believes in those so critically so all of these things together taken together culminating in him being in that chair in a tactical vest holding an Israeli weapon that was captured in a counterintelligence raid that prevented Israel from tapping the lines the internal lines that have allowed this war to continue because Israel cannot break the camb Bri Gades they cannot break their communication they cannot assassinate their leaders and their uh you know their midlevel leaders are all still intact the key leaders his brother Muhammad who will likely take over the Kasam brigades um or at least take significant roles um unless it's true that uh Muhammad de and um marn Issa the uh top two commanders of the Kasam brigades um have been assassinated which kassam has not said and Hamas has said it's not true and Israel's provided no proof for it but they've carried on with that story um in any case Muhammad senoir who was not in prison he was an operations Chief in Gaza his brother um he has the authority um and the following and the operational success to carry on what Yahya senoir LED and so sino's defeat is not uh uh sinar's death is not a defeat in any in any way uh of viewing it you lose a an incredible leader for the Palestinian national struggle but it's going to inspire and show the way for generations of Palestinians um that that will take over the leadership of the Palestinians when you're talking uh with Justin about the a slow process um who's the who's the Palestinian leader that can now sign away rights for Palestinians when their previous leader fought covered in dust with his arm TNI throwing a stick at a drone on the front lines communicating with commanders um it's just a remarkable story there's I mean we could talk about Yahya sinir for hours and maybe we will do that in the coming uh shows or maybe we'll focus on um on it in the coming show but um the important thing to understand is that trajectory the role of him as an internal Counter Intelligence agent that uh shik Ahmed Yasin and Salah shahada the founder of the Kasam brigades would see in him the person to do that and then he would go at that time and travel throughout the West Bank such that he's arrested in Janine you know the most historic place um of resistance uh other than jabalia um in in the Palestinian uh National cause and if anything it's more so because jine is the place where um shik isin alasam was killed um and that was real the beginning of the Palestinian national arm struggle um we're going to talk more about that later because I have an Abu aeda speech that came out on October 7th that talks about um the loss of your leaders that talks about assassination so um yeah that's uh Yahya Sinar um in in a little nutshell and the way that that that all interplays with the that final drone scene uh is just is is really remarkable and uh I wanted to show you that so let's let's look at the next uh the next videos the Shalit exchange released 1,026 other people besides him so besides senoir so look at look at the the the house that he's in that's the house that he's meeting with with um the Battalion commander of the tesan um Battalion um Israel said that they had killed the tesalan Battalion uh leader when they were check marking boxes for their local audience to say the war in Rafa is done um just look at that destruction the level of uh destruction we have another one here of the same thing looking from inside the house and you can just see um the view from inside the house just they just completely flattened Rafa um and that's what those satellite images from before uh are attempting to um are attempting to show you um and so next we have here the Martyr poster that Hamas released and we have uh ishma hania Salah aruri who was killed uh in Beirut uh earlier on in the war um and Yahya sinir and it says what what Hamas has said many times through this war we offer our leaders before our soldiers um they're advancing they're not retreating um they're fighting you know they're calling they're already calling uh hiya sinir the fighting Shake um because of the way that he went uh went out in battle so that's just a critical um critical part of this let's look at the next one because Hamas released a video just to show you some of the historic moments uh of senoir when he comes out of prison he gives these speeches these um important speeches you see him here walking uh amongst the people of Gaza um you know he he's just he's not uh a a polished uh politician he's a straight shoot you can just tell by the way he's articulating um that he's a straight shooter um but he's a tactical genius um and and Israeli interrogators um there's his little son Ibrahim with him there um there they are in prison um and this is the critical moment and it's not always clear to everybody but Palestinian prison isn't where you're sent away isolated from your society and isolated from the movement you can see them here walking they're having these meetings these top level meetings with senior uh kassam figures um inside the prison and you can see even though they're condition are brutal you can see that they're all living together and this is a crucial victory that was won inside the prison in the years that senoir was in leadership in the prison the the hunger strikes um forced Israel to to not have people be in solitary to allow the movements um to be together inside the prison so that the prison could become a university so that they could have lecture talks um lecture Time study time um s are translated um books from Hebrew to Arabic about military intelligence um then then they would study those and that's what he's saying they they they thought um they thought prison Israel thought prison was our grave because he was sentenced to multiple life sentences the idea was that he was never going to get out his brother executes this raid um and effectively gets him out of prison and Alters that one C capture of one soldier Alters the trajectory of the Palestinian national movement in ways that we'll be talking about for generations to come it's a remarkable uh aspect of the story and um yeah the the the one famous line was after the 2021 War uh a journalist asked him in a press conference if because Benny gance the the Prime Minister said that he was um he was going to kill senoir and senoir said if you threaten it and don't carry it out you're image will be tarnished as for your threats I have appeared in front of the media many times it is true but I will move freely and normally and I am present and after a while you will all leave and I'll go to my office I'll run my tasks I'll get in the car with some of my men I'll go to my house and they know where I live because it's obvious and after the I think it was after the 22 War he was giving a speech like that and he said um I'm going to walk home um um he was was going to a prayer tent for a martyr's tent for uh a fallen commander and he said he was going to walk there and it'll take me 10 minutes to walk there and that's the footage that you see of him walking down the street um yeah just a a remarkable leader and um the the way that his death happened um is something that um you just couldn't make it up Justin talking about novels um if you wrote it that way I I don't think people would be able to believe you um let's look at number eight tomorrow because Abu abeda handled this related to nasala this is his October 7th spee he said when have assassinations ever been the end of Liberation and resistance movements anywhere in the world especially in the history and pres of our Palestinian and Arab Revolution if assassinations were victories anti-colonial resistance would have ended with the assassination of shik isad Al kassam in the woods of Yad near Janine 90 years ago and if assassinations were victories the alcas Bri Gades would not have carried out the alaxa flood operation on October 7th 20 years after the assassination of hamas's um and Kasam most prominent Founders and he's speaking here of shik Yasin and his uh and abdulaziz ranzi he's also speaking of Kasam commanders the founding commanders like Salah shahada who I spoke of before and Adnan Al Gul who was the founder uh along with Yahya aash of the development of the indigenous arms development of the cassam brigades that came to fruition in this war of attrition where uh Palestinians are able to fight a war of attrition now 380 days on and you're going to see in the jabalia segment that I do in a few minutes that they're still firing all of those weapons uh a year into battle in fact I think we're going to show you a video where they're that's pretty clear proof they're still making them um and are ready for this battle of attrition so that's Yaya senoir in Rafa um but the Rafa Brigade is still fighting so let's look at number nine tomorrow because um we showed last week this operation they're showing here uh a booby trap uh I broke this down on the show last week it's a booby trap South South uh west of conun northwest of or sorry east Southeast of conun Northeast of Rafa along the buffer zone and they blew that up so that was part one of this Ambush um the the Palestinians have a spider-like tunnel Network so blowing up that part of the tunnel didn't change anything and five days later the Israelis go back to the same place and the Palestinians see them go back to the same place and go and rig up the tunnel a second time with Barrel bombs and you can watch if you watch at the top here uh over to the left of the two um maybe we can Loop it around again um you can see the soldier enter the tunnel here they are in um inside the tunnel you can see a couple shads here you can see a barrel bomb um oh no here it is watch the two on the left the soldiers uh in the upper left that are standing on the burm um they're going to step into the tunnel um you can see the many many triangles but you'll see the soldier disappear down into the tunnel as he goes down there disappears down into the tunnel M there's multiple of them down into the tunnel uh and even though and and and every time we see these operations now we have to think was Yahya senoir talking was he standing behind the guys when they were with had that piece of paper um he's not in the tunnel behind a desk uh being a poit bureau member he's a on the front line moving around communicating with Battalion commanders um anyways Israelis go back to the same spot in Al ran and get blown up twice in five days uh they never learn and the resistance is always one step ahead in these so U that's against an engineering unit uh in in Rafa I [Music]