In Midst of Palestinian Genocide, Late Hamas Leader Scolded for 'Eradicating' Israel

Belén Fernández

The Israeli military killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in the Gaza Strip on October 17, and it didn’t take long for the usual media suspects to line up with their anti-eulogies.

Reuters (10/18/24) called October 7 "the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust"; no similar Nazi comparisons were offered for the (probably far more than) 42,000 Palestinians killed by Israel.

Reuters (10/18/24), for example, produced an obituary headlined “Yahya Sinwar: The Hamas Leader Committed to Eradicating Israel Is Dead”—a less than charming use of terminology in light of the genocide Israel is currently perpetrating in Gaza.

Since last October, more than 42,000 Palestinians have officially been, um, eradicated—although according to a Lancet study (7/20/24; Al Jazeera, 7/8/24) published in July, the true death toll could well exceed 186,000. Per the view of Reuters, this is really the fault of Sinwar, a “ruthless enforcer” who, we are informed in the opening paragraph,

remained unrepentant about the October 7 attacks [on Israel] despite unleashing an Israeli invasion that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, laid waste to his Gaza homeland and rained destruction on ally Hezbollah.

Never mind that Sinwar's elimination will have no impact on the genocide, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear: “Today we have settled the score. Today evil has been dealt a blow, but our task has still  not been completed.”

Delegitimizing resistance

The New York Times headline (10/21/24) seems to express surprise that assassinating a negotiating partner is not a pathway to peace.

Further down in the obituary, Reuters journalist Samia Nakhoul managed to insert some biographical details that hint at reasons besides "evil" that Sinwar chose to pursue armed resistance:

Half a dozen people who know Sinwar told Reuters his resolve was shaped by an impoverished childhood in Gaza’s refugee camps and a brutal 22 years in Israeli custody, including a period in Ashkelon, the town his parents called home before fleeing after the 1948 Arab/Israeli war.

This, too, is a rather diplomatic way of characterizing the ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter that attended the 1948 creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian land—an enterprise predicated on perpetual killing, as we are now witnessing most acutely. By portraying Sinwar's actions as stemming from an intrinsic diabolicalness that made him hellbent on "eradicating" Israel—in contrast to Israel's actions, which are implicitly restrained until "unleashed" by Sinwar—the corporate media delegitimize resistance while effectively legitimizing genocide.

This longstanding commitment to laying nearly all responsibility for the conflict at Palestinian feet also leads to bizarre headlines like the New York Times' “Yahya Sinwar Is Dead, But a Palestinian State Still Seems Distant” (10/21/24). It the Biden administration's alleged hope that Sinwar's killing could “help pave the way for the eventual creation of a Palestinian state.” The idea attributes the failure to create a Palestinian state to Sinwar rather than Israel, and ludicrously imagines that genocide, along with the massive destruction of housing and basic infrastructure that Israel is committing in Gaza, are logical ways to go about state-building.

That report came on the heels of another Times intervention (10/19/24) that critiqued “Hamas’s single-minded focus on the Palestinian struggle, which had dragged the whole region into the flames”—even while acknowledging that Israel is the party presently responsible for perpetuating the conflict. This particular effort bore the headline: “Despite Sinwar’s Death, Mideast Peace May Still Be Elusive.” Well, yeah.

'Terrorist Hamas leader'

Fox News (10/17/24) labeled Sinwar a "terrorist," but didn't use the word when noting that he "rose to the top positionthe killing of previous leader Ismail Haniyeh in the explosion of a guesthouse in Tehran"; in fact, it couldn't even bring itself to mention that Israel had carried out the assassination.

For its part, Fox News (10/17/24) deployed predictable lingo in its memorialization of Sinwar, describing him in the obituary headline as “The Israeli Prisoner Turned Terrorist Hamas Leader.” Indeed, the “terrorist” label never gets old, even after decades of being wielded against enemies of Israel and the United States, the Israeli military’s partner in crime and the primary financial enabler of the current bloodbath. Lost in the linguistic stunt, of course, is the fact that both the US and Israel are responsible for a great deal more acts of terrorism than are their foes.

But pointing out such realities goes against the official line—and so we end up with Sinwar the “Hamas terrorist leader,” as ABC News (10/17/24) has also immortalized him. Time magazine (10/18/24) opted to go with a front cover featuring Sinwar’s face with a red X through it.

CNN (10/17/24), meanwhile, offered space in the second paragraph of its own reflections on Sinwar’s demise to Israeli officials' spin on the man, noting that they had “branded him with many names, including the ‘face of evil’ and ‘the butcher from Khan Younis,’” the refugee camp in southern Gaza where Sinwar was born.

Given the Israeli butchery to which Khan Younis is continuously subjected these days, it seems CNN might have refrained from taking Israel’s word for it. On just one bloody day this month, October 1, at least 51 Palestinians were killed in Israeli airstrikes on a tent camp in Khan Younis (BBC, 10/2/24)—a space that had been designated by Israel as a “humanitarian area.” Israel killed 38 more there yesterday (AP, 10/25/24).

'The threat remains'

Time (10/18/24): "The corpse of Yahya Sinwar was found in the landscape he envisioned—the dusty rubble of an apocalyptic war ignited by the sneak attack he had planned in secret for years."

Sinwar is not the only Middle Eastern resistance leader to have been recently eliminated by the Israelis. On July 31, Israel assassinated Sinwar’s predecessor Ismail Haniyeh with a bombing in Tehran, and on September 27, it killed Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, in an operation that entailed leveling an entire residential block. (What was that about terrorism?)

On the latter occasion, the Jerusalem Post (10/6/24) got its panties in a bunch over the allegedly “unnerving eulogy of the terror chief” that appeared in the New York Times (9/28/24), whose authors had not only had the audacity to call Nasrallah a “powerful orator…beloved among many Shiite Muslims,” but had also mentioned that the man had helped provide social services in Lebanon.

(That Times article also reported that some Lebanese "felt he used Hezbollah’s power to take the entire country hostage to his own interests," and it linked to another Times piece—9/28/24—about those who "welcomed Mr. Nasrallah’s death.")

The Washington Post (9/28/24) went with the noncommittal headline “Hasan Nasrallah, Hezbollah Leader and Force in Middle East, dies at 64,” while simultaneously running an op-ed by Max Boot (9/28/24): “Nasrallah Is Gone. But the Threat of Hezbollah Remains.”

Now that Sinwar is gone, too, rest assured that Israel will continue to exploit all manner of threats to justify unceasing slaughter—and that the media will be standing by with disingenuous and reductionist narratives all the way.