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Hamas announced on Tuesday that Yahya Sinwar, one of the masterminds behind the deadly Oct. 7 attacks, was selected as the next head of the group’s political office, consolidating his power over the militant group as it continues to fight Israel.
Mr. Sinwar has long been considered an architect of Hamas’s military strategy in Gaza. But now he will also replace Ismail Haniyeh, the group’s top political leader who was a key liaison in the indirect cease-fire talks with Israel.
Mr. Haniyeh was killed in an explosion last week in Tehran. Hamas and Iran both blamed Israel for his assassination — which took place during the inauguration of the new Iranian president — although Israel has not publicly taken responsibility.
Mr. Sinwar, a hard-line figure who has served as the leader of Hamas in Gaza since 2017, widely believed to be hiding out in tunnels underneath the enclave to avoid Israeli attack.
Mr. Sinwar has spent decades climbing the group’s ranks. Born in the Gaza Strip, he spent years in an Israeli prison before his release in a prisoner exchange with Israel in 2011.
— Adam Rasgon and Aaron Boxerman Reporting from Jerusalem
Key Developments
Israeli forces have killed at least 12 Palestinians, including a 14-year-old boy, in raids across the occupied West Bank since Monday, according to the Palestinian Authority Health Ministry. The Israeli military said that the operations, including two airstrikes on Jenin, were aimed at terrorist cells and that several “wanted suspects” had been arrested. Palestinian Prisoners Society, a nongovernmental rights group, said at least 16 people had been detained. The Palestinian Red Crescent said Israeli forces had also fired on their ambulances in Jenin.
President Biden spoke with leaders of Qatar and Egypt on Tuesday as he continued frantic diplomatic efforts to avert a wider war in the Middle East. The president spoke to the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al-Thani, and, separately, the president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, about their efforts to help broker a cease-fire in Gaza and calm regional tensions, the White House said. All three leaders agreed on the urgency of bringing the negotiations between Israel and Hamas “to closure as soon as possible,” the statements said.
Ultra-Orthodox men protesting their conscription into the Israeli military tried to break into a base near Tel Aviv and scuffled with police, the military said. The ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, have been exempt from military service since the founding of Israel in 1948, a source of tension with secular Israelis who must serve. In June, the Israeli Supreme Court ordered the government to begin drafting the Haredi and not to extend exemptions.
Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, discussed efforts to reduce escalating tensions in the Middle East with Badr Abdelatty, the Egyptian foreign minister, on Monday, Matthew Miller, a State Department spokesman, said in a statement. Mr. Blinken said that an agreement for a cease-fire in Israel’s war in Gaza was “of the highest priority to the United States,” according the statement.
Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union’s top diplomat, also reiterated a call for an immediate cease-fire. He wrote on X in a post on Tuesday: “Tensions keep escalating in the Middle East, bringing it on the brink of a war of unknown proportions.”
A top Russian security official met in Tehran on Monday with senior officials as Iran prepared to retaliate against Israel for the killing of Hamas’s political leader on Iranian soil last week. The Russian official, Sergei K. Shoigu, met with Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, and with the commander of the Iranian armed forces, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, who is leading the planning for military strikes on Israel.
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Hezbollah launched a stream of attack drones into northern Israel on Tuesday in what it called a response to an Israeli strike a day earlier that Israel says killed a Hezbollah field commander. The tit-for-tat attacks ratcheted up anxiety in a region as it braced for Iran and its allies to retaliate against Israel for strikes that killed Hamas and Hezbollah leaders last week.
Hezbollah said it had fired drones toward Israeli military sites north of the Israeli city of Acre. Several hours earlier, an Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon had killed five people, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry; Israel said it had hit structures used by Hezbollah.
Seven people were wounded in Hezbollah’s drone attacks, including a driver in critical condition who had been struck by shrapnel and subsequently crashed his car, according to Israeli paramedics. The Israeli military said some civilians in Israel were injured by an Israeli interceptor missile that missed its target.
Attacks between Israel and Hezbollah have been going on since the beginning of the war in Gaza, but tensions are particularly high as the region awaits a potentially huge Iran-led response to the assassination of a senior Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, as well as to the killing of Fuad Shukr, a top Hezbollah military commander, last week in Beirut.
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Iran and its proxies — which include Hamas and Hezbollah — have vowed to retaliate for the killings, prompting a frenzy of speculation of how and when they will attack. Diplomats have rushed to try to prevent the escalation from spilling into a potentially devastating war.
Abdallah Bou Habib, the Lebanese foreign minister, told reporters on Tuesday that Lebanese officials were trying to discuss an appropriate response with Hezbollah that would not prompt all-out war. But after the attack in Tehran, the decision was “bigger than Lebanon,” he said.
“We are working so that any response does not bring us to total war,” Mr. Bou Habib said at a news conference in Egypt. “That would not benefit any states, nor would it benefit Israel.”
Hezbollah began firing on Israel from Lebanon on Oct. 8, in the wake of the Hamas-led attack that set off the war in Gaza. In response, Israel has repeatedly struck in Lebanon, and over 150,000 people have fled their homes on both sides of the border.
Fears the simmering conflict could spiral out of control rose in late July, after a rocket from Lebanon landed in a crowded soccer pitch in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, killing 12 children and teenagers and wounding dozens. Hezbollah denied responsibility.
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Days later, an Israeli airstrike hit a building in southern Beirut, killing Mr. Shukr, and an explosion in Tehran later killed Mr. Haniyeh. Israel has declined to comment publicly on Mr. Haniyeh’s death, but U.S. officials have privately confirmed its involvement.
The supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has promised “harsh punishment” for the killing of the Hamas leader in Tehran. In April, after an Israeli strike targeting senior Iranian generals in Damascus, Iran fired 300 missiles and drones at the country, most of which were intercepted or failed to hit their targets.
— Aaron Boxerman and Euan Ward reporting from Jerusalem and Beirut, Lebanon
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Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli detention facilities since the Oct. 7 attacks have been subjected to systematic abuse, severe arbitrary violence, torture and inhumane conditions, B’Tselem, a prominent Israeli human rights group, said in a new report.
The group’s investigators collected testimonies from 55 Palestinians jailed by Israel who said they were held in overcrowded cells, where they received little food and water and often faced physical abuse, including sleep deprivation and sexual violence.
The report said that Israel has over the years incarcerated hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, but detainees have experienced a “massive increase in hostility from prison authorities” since Oct. 7, when Hamas led an attack on Israel in which around 1,200 people were killed.
In a statement, Israel’s prison service said that it operated according to the law, and that the report’s accusations had not been formally filed with the authorities. “As far as we know, they are baseless,” the prison service said, referring to the allegations in the report.
The report, entitled “Welcome to Hell,” said that the “abuse consistently described in the testimonies of dozens of people held in different detention facilities was so systemic that there is no room to doubt” that it is a policy of the Israeli prison authorities. It pointed to Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right Israeli national security minister and a crucial member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, as the author of the policy.
Mr. Ben-Gvir, whose office oversees the prison service, has said that “worsening the conditions of terrorists in prisons” to the legal minimum is “one of the highest goals I have set for myself.” A spokesman for Mr. Ben-Gvir did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
“Israel’s jails are no longer a sad joke,” Mr. Ben-Gvir wrote on social media last month.
Palestinians from the West Bank are generally held in Israel’s civilian prison service, while detainees from Gaza have often been funneled through Israeli military centers designated to hold them. The New York Times reported in June that detainees at one Israeli military base, Sde Teiman, had described beatings and other abuse there.
Last month, Israeli military police arrested several soldiers accused of abusing and using an object to anally rape a Palestinian detainee at Sde Teiman, according to court records and their attorneys. Their arrest prompted protests by far-right activists, who broke into two military bases to denounce their detention.
At least 60 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody since Oct. 7, the majority of them from Gaza, according to B’Tselem. The circumstances of many of their deaths remain unknown, but Israeli doctors who attended preliminary autopsies of two found signs of physical trauma such as multiple rib fractures on their bodies, according to postmortem reports that were reviewed by The Times
The report said that in July more than 9,600 Palestinians were being held in Israeli prisons and detention facilities, almost double the number being held before the war. Thousands of those were held under “administrative detention” and had not been charged with a crime and had no access to the right to defend themselves, the report said. B’Tselem said the prisoner testimony showed that more than a dozen Israeli prison facilities had been hastily converted into a network dedicated to abuse.
“Such spaces, in which every inmate is intentionally condemned to severe and relentless pain and suffering, operate as de facto torture camps,” the report said.
A rocket attack targeting U.S. personnel housed at a base in Iraq’s western desert injured several American troops late on Monday, according to U.S. defense officials.
The attack on Ain al Asad Air Base resembled previous ones carried out by Iran-backed Iraqi armed groups, which have targeted the base repeatedly over the past several years but intensified their attacks after Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza began in October.
The latest attack involved at least two rockets that hit inside the base’s perimeter, according to a U.S. official and Iraqi witnesses near the site of the attack. The base had been targeted at least twice in the past three weeks, and there was also an attack late last month on a small U.S. base in eastern Syria where U.S. special operation forces work with Syrian Kurdish troops to tamp down the Islamic State.
Initial reports were that at least five people were injured in Monday’s attack and that the wounded included both U.S. troops and contractors.
The attack comes as tensions are running especially high in the region, with Israel and its American, European and regional allies bracing for a reprisal attack from Iran in response to the killings last week of a Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, and a Hezbollah leader, Fuad Shukr, in the southern suburbs of Beirut.
Israel has said it carried out the attack on Mr. Shukr but has said nothing about the one in Iran. Iranian officials and Hamas have said that Israel was responsible for Mr. Haniyeh’s killing.
The Iranian government has said that any retaliatory attack will also involve its proxy forces, which include Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and militants in Iraq.
Those Iraqi militants have typically attacked U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria and targeted Israel using longer-range rockets. The region has been on high alert for a broad onslaught, similar to Iran’s attack on Israel in April, which was in response to Israel’s killing of three senior leaders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps and four other Revolutionary Guard officers in Damascus, Syria.
It was not clear if the rocket attack on Monday at Al Asad Air Base was part of that response or a continuation of ongoing efforts by the Iran-backed groups in Iraq to target U.S. forces, who are stationed in the country at the invitation of the Iraqi government. The chief goal of Iran-backed groups in Iraq is to force the U.S. troops to leave the country entirely. No group has taken responsibility for Monday’s attack.
There is continuing negotiation between senior defense officials in Iraq and the Pentagon over how to reconfigure and downsize the U.S. and multinational forces, but they have not yet reached a decision. Within the Iraqi government, there is division, with factions close to Iran pushing for a speedy U.S. departure while others, including many Iraqi defense officials, are pushing for limited longer-term U.S. involvement.
There are about 2,500 American troops in Iraq, as well as 900 in Syria, where the Islamic State has once again become active.
The White House said in a statement that President Biden and Vice President Kamala D. Harris had been briefed on the attack and had discussed steps that the administration would take “to defend our forces and respond to any attack against our personnel in a manner and place of our choosing.”
After a July 16 drone attack on the U.S. area of the Ain al Asad base, which did not result in injuries, the U.S. military bombed a small drone factory in Jurf al Sakhar, an area south of Baghdad, which serves as a base for the Iranian-backed group Kata’ib Hezbollah and others. The U.S. attack killed four fighters — three Iraqis and a Houthi commander — at the site.
— Alissa J. Rubin and Helene Cooper Alissa J. Rubin reported from Erbil, Iraq, and Helene Cooper from Washington.
