Israel's foreign minister confirming saying that hamas's leader Yaya sinoa has been quote eliminated we knew that they were doing tests we knew that they were trying to confirm it we knew the sorts of rumors that had gathered Pace amongst Israeli circles that they thought they had got hamas's leader in this strike well just in the last 10 minutes or so Israel's foreign minister confirming that Yaya sinoa has been eliminated and uh the US House speaker has also hailed the death of the Hamas leader let me bring in Frank Gardner our security correspondent who's joined me
once again in the studio Frank uh we started the program a couple of hours ago with that IDF spokesman saying he didn't think it would be long and it hasn't been long in terms of the confirmation yeah I mean it technically wasn't that difficult because remember that yaka Sina spent 22 years of his life in Israeli prisons so they got every possible bit of d every hair follicle every blood sample anything they wanted that would match that with the body that was found today in the rubble of that house um and this is the really
strange thing about this this was not a targeted assassination in the way that um Israel assassinated Hassan asala the Hezbollah leader last month or fed shukar um number two in healah or indeed is malania which is widely assumed to be an Israeli assassination in Teran on July the 31st this was a chance encounter this was a conventional and Israeli uh tank and infantry Unit A mechanized or an armored unit rather that was uh conducting some kind of combat operation in Gaza um they fired the tank fired a shell into the building is my understanding and
the Infantry then went in to have a look uh to check what was left and then they found what looked very like the corpse of yaka sinir and that is where this has sprung from and so you know the rumors then circulated from there Frank let me just read a quote from David Petraeus former director of the CIA because he's been speaking to the BBC and it's an extraordinary quote because he said it is hard to overstate how important this is this is bigger than AMA Bin Laden who was massively symbolic but not that operational
this is both hugely symbolic he was after all the complete leader of Hass but also hugely operational that coming from David petus is extraordinary I mean yeah I you know for somebody who ran Central Command of US Department of Defense who then was the architect of the entire counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq which at the time worked under his control and his Direction and who then ran the CIA and was also um K Isa commander of um of NATO forces in Afghanistan so that is extraordinary and I think just to drill down into what he means
there so for Americans the killing of assama Bin ladin 10 years after 911 in 2011 in Pakistan was some form of closure was very very important for them that day but as David betrus says um you know he was he wasn't controlling he wasn't running Al-Qaeda he was occasionally there was the odd video but really he was so worried about being targeted that he didn't really have much of a role left he was symbolic but this guy Yahya sinoa was still running Hamas from down presumably down in the tunnels although this was above ground where
he appears to have been found and Hamas I think is at a Crossroads now as indeed they were on July the 31st when they lost isma hania who was the head of their political wing and they chose to replace him with this militant um you know plenty of people will have other names for him but Yahya Sinar is a man was a man steeped in violence and who chose a very violent path in in his life you said there that Hamas is at a Crossroads moment potentially two is Benjamin Netanyahu at a Crossroads moment about
what he does next perhaps aside from Iran um well yes because if you take let's say go right back to Gaza and the Ceasar two weeks ago roughly we had Anthony blinkin the US Secretary of State in London together with David Lamy giving a joint press conference in which he said we are 90% of the way there on a ceasefire deal for for Gaza you know bring that ceasefire into operation into effect and the whole temperature of the Middle East will drop it won't solve everything it doesn't create a Homeland for the Palestinians it doesn't
stop a lot of things that have been going wrong but it would lower the temperature and he said you know getting that last 10% over the line has been really difficult right now is an opportunity to do that but it's not going to be that easy because for two reasons the two people who have been holding it up have been Benjamin Netanyahu and Yak ya sinoa now a lot of gin a lot of heras members are going to be extremely angry and vowing revenge vowing Vengeance and vowing total lack of any kind of compromise but
gazans are exhausted they've had a year of this they've been pummeled into the ground by Israeli air strikes and there will be a desperate yearning for a ceasefire and for a relief from all of this so there is an opportunity now to make a deal that sees the release of all those Israeli hostages to sees an end sees an end to the plight of gazans of whom 42,000 Plus have been killed but many people suspect that Benjamin Netanyahu is not interested in doing that right now that he wants to take on all of Israel's enemies
at once and he wants the back in the United States to do it Frank thanks for that
