Leaderless: the death of Yahya Sinwar

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The Economist. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from Jason. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. It's 18 days until America's election and we are continuing our series looking at the swing states where a comparatively small number of voters will swing a comparatively enormous election. Next up today, Wisconsin and Michigan. And just a single genetic mutation was responsible for the progeria that defined Sammy Basso's life. A young man's mind in a body that aged at an astonishing rate. Our obituary editor reflects on a life spent learning about and drawing attention to the disease. But first, In Israel last night, news spread that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, was dead. The architect of the October 7 attacks had been on the run in Gaza for more than a year. In the end, it was not a precision strike, but a chance encounter. Israel's defense forces found him as they combed an area outside the city of Rafah.

This moment gives us an opportunity to.

Finally end the war in Gaza.

World leaders were quick to call the killing an opportunity for peace. Mr. Sinoir's October 7 attacks rattled the whole region, but it's not clear that his death will undo any of that.

The death of Yehosh Senwar may be a turning point in this war.

Anshelfeffer is our Israel correspondent and is based in Jerusalem.

The Israeli government is hailing it as a huge victory. Hamas has been dealt another massive blow. It may just open up a brief window of opportunity to finally reach a ceasefire in Gaza. But we thought there were windows like this already over the past year, and each time our hopes were dashed.

So how is it that this happened?

Sinwar, like the other senior leaders of Hamas, has obviously been on Israel's hit list since October 7, and there have been a number of operations to try and locate and eliminate him. In this case, it was a patrol which wasn't specifically hunting for him. They saw three gunmen. A gunfight began. The gunmen split, and two of them went into one building and a third in the other. They called in the tank fire. The two who ran in one direction were killed. The third seems to have been wounded. When it became light, they sent in a mini drone. The wounded person was still moving. He managed to throw a stick at the drone. Another tank shell was fired. And then when they combed the building, they found Sinwar's body.

And Israel has managed to kill several serious Hamas figures in Gaza and indeed Hezbollah figures in Lebanon. What makes Mr. Sinoh's death so significant?

Sinwar is significant for two main reasons. First of all, because he was the overall mastermind, not just of the October 7th attack, but the whole strategy of years in which Hamas were broadcasting this kind of relatively pragmatic signals to Israel that they were prepared to go for some kind of a truce. But beyond the fact that this was his strategy, Sinwar really was the main figure in Hamas. Ever since he was released from Israeli prison in 2011, he very quickly became the leader in Gaza. And since Hamas is a movement which has both a military wing and a political wing, he managed to stride the two. He kept his roots in the military wing where he had grown up. He had been one of the founders, but he also became a major player in the Hamas political sphere. As we saw three months ago, after Israel killed Ismail Haniyeh, the former political leader, Sinwar was appointed as the overall leader of the political branch. And also Sinwar, I think, saw himself as becoming ultimately a leader of the Palestinian people. And I think October 7th, in many ways, was his play for that leadership.

And so in the absence of his leadership, what happens to Hamas now, well.

Hamas is significantly weakened. It was already weakened before Sinwa died because so many of its fighters and so much of its military and governing infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed over the past year. But anyone who thinks this is the end of Hamas is obviously deluding themselves. It has its branches in other Palestinian territories and beyond, in parts of the Arab world. Hamas isn't going away. But with Sinwar's death and with the assassination of other main figures both in Gaza, but also Haniyeh, was assassinated in Tehran. El Arouri, another important leader, who at the beginning of the year was assassinated in Beirut, that layer of leadership, most of them have been around since Hamas founding in the 1980s, has always been wiped out, with very few exceptions. So the vacuum now, this need for new leadership, especially on the ground in Gaza, I think is going to hamper Hamas, at least in the next few months until a new hierarchy can be established.

And what about the notion that Mr. Sinwar's death creates some sort of path to peace here? Talk me through that. How might that work?

Well, the main remaining leader of Hamas is now Khaled Mashal, who is outside Gaza and has always been more pragmatic than the rest of the leadership. Most importantly, he was the main opposition to Hamas growing closer to Iran in recent years. We know that in the various talks so far for a ceasefire, he has been more flexible. And I think also on the ground, the remaining Hamas commanders in Gaza now have a much bigger incentive, especially those who control the locations of some of the 101 hostages were still there. Israel is committed to doing everything in our power to bring all of them home. And Israel will guarantee the safety of all those who return our hostages. After the death of Sinwar had been confirmed, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's Prime Minister, announced a sort of immunity or amnesty that those who will release hostages will be able to walk out alive. But to those who would harm our hostages, I have another message. Israel will hunt you down and bring you to justice. There's a very short window of opportunity to still use this bargaining chip of the hostages. And also for Hamas as a movement, a ceasefire now is the only thing which will save them a bit of their control of Gaza. For now, without Sinwar, and in the current situation of Gaza, they're losing control of the population there.

Those are the incentives from the Hamas side. But what about from the Israeli side in terms of using this path to peace?

Well, that's a really good question. Netanyahu, until now, has refused a ceasefire that was brokered by The Americans, by the Qataris and the Egyptians. I mean, Sinhua refused it as well. So both of them were the obstacles to that. Netanyahu now has a political incentive to say, look, we've won now. We've killed Xinhua, we've killed the other main planners and commanders of October 7th. Hamas is almost finished in Gaza. If some kind of a ceasefire under better conditions can be reached, Netanyahu would have an incentive for going for that. At the same time, I think also Netanyahu is not yet at that place where he is prepared to agree to an end for the war in Gaza. He has far right partners in his coalition who are still against that. He himself probably doesn't want to allow that moment of national reckoning in Israel which has yet to come for, for all the failures of October 7th. So it's hard to predict what Netanyahu will do now. And I think there's a good chance that he may wait until we know the result of the American election, because whoever's the next president of the United States may change the American policy on Gaza.

But Israel's fight against Hamas in Gaza is really just one part of a mosaic of conflicts in the region. What do you think it means in that broader context that Mr. Sinwar is dead?

For most of the past year, we hoped that a ceasefire in Gaza would also solve the tension between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon and also hopefully de escalate the situation between Israel and Iran. Sinwar's death and what may be an opening for a ceasefire, it comes at a moment when Gaza has almost become a sideshow to those other two events. We've got Israel imminently planning to attack Iran with airstrikes following Iran's missile attack two weeks ago. We've got Israel already on the ground in Lebanon and in what has become a very intensive war with Hezbollah. So I don't think the ceasefire in Gaza, even if it can be achieved, will necessarily end those other conflicts right now.

Angel, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you for having me. Jason Foreign.

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CNN now projects that Donald Trump will.

Carry the state of Wisconsin in 2016. A shock election result in America's Midwest punched three big holes in the so.

Called blue wall and the wall comes tumbling down. This is the blue wall that Hillary Clinton had talked about.

This is Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, industrial states where unions had consistently delivered. Working class voters for Democrats all voted for Donald Trump.

The idea that the Clinton campaign could see white working class voters going to Trump in places like Iowa and Ohio and not see that Wisconsin was also potentially in jeopardy, that's remarkable.

Since then, Democrats have bounced back kind of. President Joe Biden narrowly won all three in 2020. But part of that swing to the right that surprised in 2016 was from sweeping demographic changes in the voter base and this year, changes in who votes for Democrats and why could make a repeat of 2016 possible. As part of our series on swing states that will ultimately decide America's presidential election, today we're looking at Wisconsin and Michigan. Through them runs Kamala Harris, most logical path to the White House.

Michigan and Wisconsin were not states that Democrats used to worry about at all.

Idris Kalun is the Economist's Washington bureau chief.

They were part of the blue wall, the set of states that reliably voted for Democrats for decades. And then in 2016, it all came crashing down. Hillary Clinton lost Michigan by a quarter of a point. She lost Wisconsin by less than a point, a state that she didn't even bother to visit during her campaign. And what we've seen in 2020 and what we see now is that these states are actually the primary battlegrounds on which the election will be decided.

Well, talk us through that. How are they trying to keep the competition alive in those states?

First of all, they're visiting a lot. So Kamala Harris, she kicked off her new campaign when she visited Milwaukee. The path to the White House goes through Wisconsin. Yes, it does. And to win in Wisconsin, we are counting on you right here in Milwaukee. That came only a few weeks after the Republicans had their national convention there.

And I promise we will make Wisconsin great again.

We're going to make it.

Combined, these two states have 25 electoral votes. If you throw in Pennsylvania as Well, that has 19. That actually is probably the best pathway for Kamala Harris to win the election, especially now that it looks less likely that the other swing states, like Arizona, like Georgia, like North Carolina, are going to go her way. So for that reason, it's also the path that Donald Trump needs to block if he is going to become president again. And so far, it looks like it's going to be a nail biter. The polls in Wisconsin are incredibly close. Our forecast model has it at 50 50. And while Harris looks like she has a slight edge in Michigan, if you talk to Democrats in these states, the thing that they worry about is not just the polls, but also whether the polls are wrong. So in 2016 and in 2020, pollsters generally understated Donald Trump's performance. And so Democrats are worried that if the error goes against them, that's very bad for their prospects of winning the presidency.

So this is not the first in our swing states series that's looked at a state or states that have become competitive. And so far, that's been often down to demographic change. I mean, what would you say has happened in these states that's made them competitive?

The big trend that has remade American politics in the last few decades has been educational polarization. This tendency for college educated voters, particularly white ones, to vote for the Democratic Party while the working class voters, again especially among the white working class, have gravitated towards the Republican Party. And that has made these reliably safe blue wall states, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, into more battlegrounds because they do have large white working class populations.

So if the educational divide then is so important here, how does that translate to the ground? How are the campaigns campaigning in Michigan and Wisconsin to.

In Michigan, Democrats are focused on turning out college educated voters in the suburbs. They're doing that by emphasizing Republican threats to abortion, emphasizing Donald Trump's unfitness for office. Those are exactly the kinds of appeals that have moved college educated voters away from Republicans and towards Democrats.

So how are the campaigns trying to win over the non college educated?

You see that play out in Wisconsin, where I visited and got to follow around both of the Senate candidates who were competing there. Democrats have a rich history there. There are a lot of famous progressives who come out of Wisconsin politics. They've suffered a couple of defeats, namely in 2010 when Republicans flipped the state legislature and then they elected Scott Walker as governor, who was at the time a rising star in the party. Democrats have managed to maintain competitiveness in that state, but that takes a lot of effort to do so. The Democrat, Tammy Baldwin, who's running for her third Senate term, is Particularly good at not losing by too much in the rural areas outside of Madison and outside of Milwaukee. She told me she does that by talking a lot about what she does for dairy farmers. It's very kind of nuts and bolts stuff.

My Dairy Business Innovation act is something.

I'm very proud of.

Got it into the 2018 farm bill and it provides grants to small producers, small processors, to improve efficiency or expand export markets.

But right now she is facing probably her toughest challenge from a Republican named Eric Hufte. He's a self made multimillionaire businessman. And when I caught up to him at an event with the Milwaukee Police Association, I asked him why it was that working class voters were moving towards the Republican Party. Look at how the left has demonized the police department, how they demonize a lot of blue collar people. You know, if you don't vote for them, you're deplorable. And I think what you see there is both are playing for the working class voter and both are considering themselves the true champion of the working class and the middle class. There are roughly two Americans who didn't go to college or have a college degree for everyone who does. And those voters are particularly important in states like Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania, which will ultimately decide who the next president is going to be.

So who is doing this pivot better? Who is playing to the requirements of these states better at the moment?

Well, the tide over the last two decades has been that the working class has moved towards the Republican Party and it's hard for Democrats to fight that. They are trying now and they can point to concrete results. They can point to the Inflation Reduction Act, a lot of the infrastructure spending that Donald Trump pledged but never actually managed to do. But I think it's tough to remind voters of that, particularly when so many Americans are upset about costs, they're upset about inflation. If you look at polling that we've done with YouGov, 40% of Americans say that they think that the country's in a recession right now, which is kind of incredible. It's completely not true. But that gives you a sense of what the average voter's malaise looks like. And I think ultimately what we've seen is that the reason that people are voting, it's not purely based on economic policy. A lot of it has to do with their feeling about which party better represents them and people like them. And I think a lot of working class voters no longer feel at home in the Democratic Party and that is a long run challenge for them.

Thanks very much. For taking us through all of that.

Idris, thank you.

You can hear a lot more from Idris and the other co hosts of Checks and Balance, our subscriber only show on American politics Politics later today, it's your one stop shop to understand the run up to and ultimately the aftermath of the American election. Today's episode is a deep dive on how gender is playing into the race.

Like any 18 year old, Sammy Basso had great plans for the summer after he left high school.

Ann Roe is the Economist's obituaries editor.

They involve mostly having a grand relaxation with his friends and beer and going on the beach and all that sort of thing. But his parents were behaving rather mysteriously and had other plans up their sleeve. And what they at last revealed to him was that they were all going to go on a road trip to the United States. They lived in Italy and it had long been a dream of Sammy's to go to America. As he packed his suitcase, he put all sorts of crazy things in, like a Yoda mask and a Hawaiian shirt to wear in Los Angeles. And then on this list he put pills. And then in brackets. Sadly, He did have to take an awful lot of drugs with him because he had progeria. This is a very, very rare disease. It affects in about 1 in 20 million people. The doctors had been completely puzzled by the fact that he didn't seem to grow much after six months. They couldn't think what was wrong with him. The diagnosis finally came when he was 2, and from that point on, although his brain was as sharp as anything, he had a punishing regime of injections which led him to have a horror of needles. He also had to go to the physiotherapist twice a week to have his joints manipulated to help him walk or do anything with his limbs at all because they kept stiffening up as they would in old age. So it was an extremely difficult illness to cure. Very few people had heard of it, even doctors, and almost no research had been done on it. The problem for Sammy was simply to try to get through life as well as he could while looking as if he was about 70 years older than he was. The trip to America was a great success, however. He sang in a gospel choir, he threw out the first ball in a baseball game, he ate wonderful ribs, and he went to Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon. These were his favorite experiences. He toured around them in a white minivan with a Navajo guide who actually gave him a Navajo name which thrilled him the most exciting or the funniest incident though, happened in Roswell, New Mexico, where a suspected UFO had crashed in 1947. Sammy went to the museum in Roswell and there he found they had a mock up of a crashed spacecraft and mannequins of aliens standing by it. So he put on slanty eyed, green rimmed sunglasses and he was an extremely convincing looking alien. As he stood there, he said to a woman who was passing by, have you seen my spaceship? I'm sure I left it round here somewhere. And therefore managed to freak her out considerably. He said it in his broad Venetian dialect, so as far as she was concerned, he might well have come from out of the space. He enjoyed being a perfect alien most of the time. He played up to this and was a very funny, witty companion. But there was always a battle going on inside. One side of him saying, why did God do this to me? Why am I suffering like this? And the other side saying, well, maybe it's a gift, maybe there's some reason you have it. Maybe God has a plan for you and you should be thankful to him and to Progeria for the life you're having. The greatest gift he could offer people was that his brain and mind had not been affected at all by Progeria. He was extremely bright. When he was five, he decided he wanted to be a medical researcher because he encountered quite a few of those. He got a degree in natural sciences and then added to that another degree in molecular biology. And he worked very closely indeed with all the researchers who were working on Progeria. He willingly made himself a guinea pig for any new treatments that came up. And one in particular which slowed down the growth of the toxic protein in the cells, seemed to have quite a good effect. And it was probably the reason that he managed to live almost double the time of most progeria patients. Most of them die when they're 14 or 15. So he had already helped to establish one cure, and the one that really excited him, although it was some years off, was base editing, which meant taking the faulty gene and replacing it with the correct one. He really knew that he would not be around when it did at last succeed. But he was very keen to spare any sort of research in it. He also never stopped dreaming. His favorite subject at school had actually been physics. Although he was crazy for all kinds of science, he imagined that he might spend his career working at CERN in Geneva. But he was increasingly drawn to the interesting world of quanta and he thought perhaps he would try to become a particle physicist. Somewhere out there, among those extraordinary little particles and relationships of matter. Some, somewhere, there might be the clue to progeria, the clue to a cure. And he might be the person who would discover it.

Ann roe on sammy basso, who's died aged 28. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jad Gill. Our deputy editor is John Jo Devlin. And our sound designer is Will Rowe. Our senior producers are Rory Galloway and Sarah Larnyuk. And our senior creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Maggie Khedifa and Benji Guy. And our assistant producer is Henrietta McFarlane. With extra production help this week from Emily Elias. We'll all see you back here tomorrow for the weekend. Intelligence. Sam.