‘Sinwar has delusions of grandeur, he always thinks he’s better than everyone else,’ the official confessed.
By Batya Jerenberg
The Hamas minister of communications has told his Shabak interrogators that Gazan leader Yahya Sinwar is hugely unpopular now in the coastal enclave after two months of war in which Israel has leveled much of its northern region and is moving steadily south in its mission to destroy the terrorist organization.
Israel’s intelligence agency released part of its grilling of Yousef al-Mansi Sunday.
In the translated portions, al-Mansi notes that of those he met over the last two months, “People are saying ‘Sinwar and his group have destroyed us. We have to be rid of them.”
According to al-Mansi, “Everyone hates Sinwar,” and there are people “praying night and day that God should free us from him,” which he says includes all the Hamas fighters as well, since he is their leader.
He gave as an example an old man he heard in the market, who asked rhetorically, “A mouse that attacks a lion is smart or insane?” “Everyone agreed,” he said.
The captured official claimed that he felt the same way, saying that Sinwar “is crazy, he makes decisions without consulting with anyone [and] the group around him, which is just as crazy, carry them out – and Gaza is in ruins.”
When asked about Sinwar’s personality, he claimed that he had never sat with him, but based on what others have complained in his hearing, al-Mansi described the Hamas chief as one who “has delusions of grandeur, he always thinks he’s better than everyone else.”
Ordinary Gazans want them all to go, he repeated.
He went so far as to say that “even if [Sinwar] stays alive, no one will pay attention to him, they’ll demonstrate against him,” and he supposedly would too, “if I were in Gaza,” hurriedly adding, “but I’m old and sick, if I could go demonstrate, I would.”
Al-Mansi condemned the October 7 invasion of Gaza envelope communities, in which up to 3,000 Hamas fighters took some 240 hostages while massacring 1,200 people in heinous ways, including burning whole families alive, beheading infants, and raping and mutilating women before shooting them in the head.
This was the “opposite of Islam,” he said. “This is heresy, madness. What they did is unacceptable according to logic, religion, or intellect.”
He laid the blame squarely on Sinwar, saying that he and his group were “responsible.” He did not mention that there was a second wave of around a thousand Palestinian civilians who followed the uniformed terrorists to loot, and kill as well.
Israel has declared that it is actively hunting for the Hamas leader, believing that his death would shorten the war.
Asked for his estimation of how badly the terrorists’ fighter force has been decimated, the minister gave a wildly inflated figure of “over 90, 95%,” while hedging his words by saying “I don’t have information.” Those who are left are “scattered, and very weak, without abilities,” he continued, and “will wait for the chance when the war is over, to throw away their weapons and run away…. [Hamas official military wing] Al-Qassem [Brigades] is finished.”
The IDF estimates that it has killed some 7,000 out of approximately 30,000 combatants thus far, and that it will take another four to seven weeks of war to decimate Hamas to the extent al-Mansi said.
Al-Mansi made a careful distinction between the “civilian” arm of the Hamas government, to which he belonged, and the military.
He said that if funding was received by the “government,” but “they” took it, then the military had “stolen from the people.” This would include, he said, funding from the Qataris and international organizations for projects such as “roads, hospitals, which serve the whole populace.”
“But it could be that there was additional funding that we don’t know about” for the military wing, he maintained. “They bring it from Iran, in other ways, we don’t know anything about that.”
Israel, the U.S., the E.U., and other Western countries do not differentiate between the various parts of Hamas, designating it as a whole as a terrorist organization. Some countries have only banned its military wing.
When asked what “Hamas” has achieved in the war, he responded, “Destruction…. The Gaza Strip has regressed over 200 years.”
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