Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas elected a hardline member of its armed wing as its new Gaza head on Monday, Hamas officials said.
“Yahya Sinwar was elected to head the Hamas political office in the Gaza Strip”, the officials said.
He will succeed Ismail Haniya, who is seen by many observers as the most likely successor to Hamas’s current exiled leader Khaled Meshaal. In September 2015, Sinwar was added to the US terrorism blacklist alongside two other members of Hamas’s military wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades.
A graduate in Arabic, he was born in the Khan Younis refugee camp in southern Gaza and founded “Majd”, one of Hamas’s intelligence services. Arrested by Israel in 1988 for “terrorist activity,” Sinwar was sentenced to four life sentences.
He was released in October 2011 under an agreement to exchange more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for the release of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured five years earlier.
Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza Strip for a decade, has been conducting internal elections for several months.