An American Senator’s Threat to Sinwar

“Sinwar, your days are numbered, pal. We’re not going to indict you, we’re going to kill you.”* This was the threat Sen. Lindsey Graham made to Yehya Sinwar, head of Hamas’ political bureau, in an interview with Fox News on Sept. 4, 2024. He followed his threat by saying, “If the Republican Party wins the 2024 presidency, their goal will be to kill Sinwar, not to try him.”*

We may ask by what right Sen. Graham makes this threat, and who appointed him to do so. At the same time, we pose the same question to the U.S. Department of Justice: What gives you the right to file lawsuits against Sinwar and other Hamas leaders for Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in a federal court in New York? And who gave you that authority?

Sen. Graham does not know and does not want to understand that martyrdom is one of the highest aspirations of Sinwar and his soldiers. Those soldiers did not join this fight without knowing that it would be a difficult one, only leading to martyrdom or victory. We have already seen how, after Sen. Graham’s statement and the U.S. Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Sinwar, Sinwar shared a video clip of him saying, “We, and the Islamic Jihad, are not interested in removal from the terrorism list. We do not need to repent to the American administration or others to be removed from the list. We are undertaking our national, moral and religious duties. We will not compromise from our political creed to be taken off the terrorism list, whether it be individuals or organizations.”

It appears that the U.S. and its senator have not learned the lesson well that the politics of bullying, which led to the assassination of resistance leaders, did not prove effective. Rather, it fed the resistance. Each time a leader died, another worse, more radical leader filled his spot. And that is exactly what has been noted in Gaza. After a group of martyrs left, a stronger generation filled its spot, armed with conviction and faith. As we can see, the politics of assassinations targets bodies only; it cannot eliminate belief and conviction or the idea of martyrdom. The U.S. can’t understand this. That is what the author Abdel Bari Atwan mentioned on the Opinion Today website on Sept. 5, 2024, when he wrote: “What Sen. Graham, and before him Benjamin Netanyahu, do not know and cannot understand is that the Mujahid Sinwar and his men, whether in occupied Palestine, southern Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq or Syria are another type of human being. They aspire to martyrdom, even rush to it, following in the steps of the first Muslims who defeated the Persian Empire and the Roman Empire while spreading their religion throughout the world.”

Sen. Graham’s threat to kill Sinwar is not new. Sen. Graham previously called for a nuclear bombing of Gaza. Additionally, during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he said, “Israel, do whatever you have to do”* to end the military campaign and “Israel would be justified in razing Gaza to the ground using a nuclear weapon, simply because the United States did that in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 1940s against Japan, and that was the right decision.”* It is unfortunate that in the time that some American individuals and organizations have condemned Graham’s statements, we have seen no Arab condemnation other than Hamas, which reiterated that “these shocking statements are evidence of the depth of moral decline Graham has reached and of the mentality that lives in some elite political circles in the U.S. It is compatible with genocide, carried out by the immoral occupation army against defenseless citizens.”*

It appears that Graham is ingrained with sadism, as all his statements are inflammatory with respect to the countries in the region. Last December on Fox News, Graham encouraged President Joe Biden to blow up parts of Iran and erase it from the map. In the interview, he said: “I have been saying for six months now, hit Iran. They have oil fields out in the open, they have the Revolutionary Guard headquarters you can see from space. Blow it off the map.”*

These bullying statements are no longer acceptable to Americans. American media are losing their influence over the American people due to modern social media spreading the reality of the situation. For this reason, Graham’s statements prompted angry reactions from many commentators and organizations. American lawyer and political commentator George Conway wrote, “Sen. Lindsey Graham is embarrassing us,”* while the White House stayed silent. Additionally, writer Mohamed Elmenshawy reported on Al-Jazeera Net’s website on May 15, 2024 that he monitored the reactions in Washington to Graham’s statements, including commentary by Code Pink, a feminist movement in America founded to reject the decision to invade Iraq. The movement said, “It is shameful that a sitting senator can call, on live television, for the nuclear bombing of Gaza, at a time when he sees students protesting genocide.”* In order for us to see the invisible reasons for Graham’s statements, we must read what Code Pink said: “Graham received $1.5 million from AIPAC to say this.”* (AIPAC is a lobbying group that advocates for pro-Israel policies in the legislative and executive branches of the United States).

The reality is that just because a person becomes a senator does not mean they are necessarily a good person. In Graham’s situation, the best person to speak to his disorder is his former aide Nicholas Connors, who said, “Some argue that Lindsey Graham is the worst member of the U.S. Congress. I find it hard to say anything positive about him. Since the death of his dear friend John McCain, he has become a troubled person.”* The reality is that his disorder can’t be the result of McCain’s death, as it was present beforehand.

Returning to Graham’s threat to kill Sinwar, we could say that Israel may achieve this, given that they have killed many others, but Sen. Graham should know that this policy of assassinations hasn’t eliminated the Palestinian resistance in the last half century. Leaders and officials from every Palestinian organization and movement have been killed, and yet, despite this, a struggling generation prepared for martyrdom has emerged. So, if Sinwar is killed, there are more than Sinwar, there are hundreds of those who continue the path of struggle and jihad, a path that will not end because of missing individuals.

*Editor’s note: These quotes, though accurately translated, could not be independently verified.