The Palestine Liberation Organization on Friday mourned the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, eulogizing his “martyrdom” in Gaza.
“The Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization expresses its condolences to the Palestinian people and all national factions on the martyrdom of the great national leader Yahya Sinwar,” the committee announced in a statement.
The PLO is represented by the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria, and is headed by Mahmoud Abbas.
Abbas’s Fatah Party, considered a more secularist movement than Hamas and which was violently ousted by the Islamist militant organization from the Gaza Strip in 2007, expressed its condolences as well, saying that Israel’s “killing and terrorism will not succeed in breaking the will of our people.”
The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, another group that comprises the PLO coalition, said: “The martyrdom of Sinwar is a further incentive that pushes the Palestinian people [to continue its fight against Israel],” Turkish media reported.
Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya hailed Sinwar as a “hero who fought the Israeli forces until his last breath.”
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan sent his condolences to Hamas representatives in person in a meeting held in Turkey on Friday.
The foreign ministry said in a statement that Turkey will “use all diplomatic means to mobilize the international community against the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.”
This is not the first time that the PLO, which is considered a more moderate Palestinian faction, has sung the praises of an arch-terrorist.
In September, Abbas conveyed his condolences to Hezbollah after Israel assassinated its leader Hassan Nasrallah in a powerful airstrike in Beirut.
“President Mahmoud Abbas has expressed his condolences to Lebanon and Hezbollah in the aftermath of Israel’s assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, the Secretary-General of the organization,” the Palestinian WAFA news agency reported at the time.
In the wake of the assassination in Tehran of Ismail Haniyeh, the former head of Hamas’s political bureau, Abbas again heaped praise on a Hamas leader, calling the killing a “crime.”
“The latest massacre, the latest oppression, was the crime against the leader martyr Ismail Haniyeh. I call upon you, my brothers and sisters, to say Al-Fatiha on his soul,” Abbas said in an address to the Turkish parliament in August.
Israeli forces eliminated Sinwar, the military-terrorist who plotted the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre, in southern Gaza on Wednesday.
Soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces’ 450th Battalion, the IDF School for Infantry Corps Professions and Squad Commanders (known by its Hebrew acronym, the Bislamach Brigade), had spotted what they thought was an ordinary three-man terror cell in Rafah and closed in on them, eliminating the entire squad.
The following morning, Oct. 17, troops tentatively identified one of the bodies as that of Sinwar. It was taken back to Israel, where it was identified via fingerprint, dental records and DNA analysis.