Yahya Sinwar waves to supporters as he arrives to attend a rally marking Al-Quds Day in Gaza City on April 14, 2023.MOHAMMED ABED/AFP/Getty Images
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who ignited a new era of spiralling violence in the Middle East with the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, has been killed in Gaza.
His death was confirmed by the Israeli government Thursday after an hours-long examination of forensic evidence.
He was reportedly killed when Israeli troops spotted three armed men in a building and ordered a tank to fire on them.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the death of the feared commander marked “the beginning of the day after Hamas.”
Reuters also reported that its sources in Hamas believed he was dead, though there was no official comment from the militant group.
It was Mr. Sinwar who conceived of and ordered last year’s shock invasion of southern Israel, an attack that killed almost 1,200 people and saw some 250 others taken back to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip as hostages. That set in motion an Israeli assault on Gaza that has killed more than 42,000 people, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, and driven more than 90 per cent of its population of just over two million from their homes, according to United Nations figures.
The war has now spilled over into a separate conflict between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia which, like Hamas, is backed by Tehran. Israel and Iran have also exchanged direct attacks, raising fears of a regionwide conflagration.
In a video statement, Mr. Netanyahu vowed that “Hamas will no longer rule Gaza,” though he said the 377-day-old war in Gaza was not over. “To the Hamas terrorists I say: Your leaders are fleeing and they will be eliminated,” he said, adding that anyone who surrendered and freed the hostages they were holding would be spared.
The 61-year-old Mr. Sinwar was a hardliner even within Hamas, a group that has always viewed the destruction of Israel as the only long-term solution to conflict in the Middle East. While some of the people taken by Hamas to Gaza were released, Mr. Sinwar refused until the end to release the remaining hostages – believed to number about 100, though as many as half that figure are feared dead.
During the year-long negotiations to reach a ceasefire, it was always either Mr. Sinwar or Mr. Netanyahu who were blamed for scuppering talks whenever an agreement seemed close.
In a statement, U.S. President Joe Biden said Mr. Sinwar’s death was “a good day for Israel, for the United States, and for the world.” He said the elimination of the Hamas leader opened the way for a fresh effort to free the hostages and end the war. “There is now the opportunity for a ‘day after’ in Gaza without Hamas in power, and for a political settlement that provides a better future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivered a similar message: “Today delivers a measure of justice for his victims and their families. Sinwar’s death ends a reign of terror.”
Grisly photographs posted online suggest the Hamas leader’s corpse was found buried in the rubble of a building in Gaza. He was wearing combat fatigues, and his face was ashen grey. His forehead and left knee had been punctured either by a weapon or falling debris.
While the Israeli government had portrayed Mr. Sinwar throughout the war as hiding underground in a network of tunnels while ordinary Palestinians suffered, Israeli media reported Thursday that he had been killed after a chance encounter above ground with Israeli troops.
The Yedioth Aharonoth newspaper reported that an Israeli patrol in the southern city of Rafah spotted three armed men in a building and called for a tank to fire on the position. It was only afterward that the Israeli troops realized that one of the dead, who was reportedly found with a large amount of cash, looked a lot like Israel’s most wanted man.
“He was a true leader. He did not die in the tunnels, he did not die surrounded by hostages. He died as a fighter,” said Omar Assaf, a veteran Palestinian activist in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where the early reaction to news of Mr. Sinwar’s death was largely disbelief. In an interview, Mr. Assaf predicted that Mr. Sinwar’s death would have little effect on the course of the war. “Resistance will continue.”
Mr. Sinwar was born in 1962 in the Khan Younis refugee camp in what was then Egyptian-ruled Gaza. His family had fled their homes near what is now the city of Ashkelon – just 50 kilometres north of Khan Younis – during the 1948 war that followed the declaration of the state of Israel. He was five years old when Israel bested the combined Arab armies in the Six-Day War that left Israel in military control of Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
The occupying Israeli army arrested Mr. Sinwar for the first time when he was 20. He joined Hamas upon its founding five years later and became a member of its security apparatus. In 1988, he shot to public notoriety in Israel and the Palestinian Territories as “the Butcher of Khan Younis” after he admitted to a series of grisly crimes, including the killings of two Israeli soldiers and the executions of a dozen Palestinians he suspected of collaborating with Israel.
He was sentenced to four life sentences. His fellow inmates say he devoted the 22 years he served in jail to mastering Hebrew and translating the biographies of Israeli military officials into Arabic so he and his followers could study the tactics of the enemy.
In 2008, Mr. Sinwar survived a bout of brain cancer after receiving life-saving surgery in an Israeli prison. DNA from his time in prison was used to confirm his death Thursday.
He was released in 2011 – by Mr. Netanyahu – as one of 1,027 Palestinians freed in exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who had been kidnapped and taken to Gaza by Hamas five years earlier.
Mr. Sinwar’s death follows the July assassinations of Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif and the group’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh. Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, had been seeking arrest warrants for all three Hamas leaders in relation to their alleged roles in the Oct. 7 attacks. (Mr. Khan is still separately seeking the arrest of Mr. Netanyahu and Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israeli forces during the subsequent war in Gaza.)
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was also assassinated in a Sept. 27 Israeli air strike on the suburbs of Beirut. In the aftermath, Israel began what it called a limited ground invasion of Lebanon, aimed at driving Hezbollah away from Israel’s northern border. Hezbollah has been launching rocket and drone attacks across the border since Oct. 8, 2023, in what the group has called an act of “solidarity” with Hamas.
The deaths of Mr. Deif and Mr. Haniyeh left Mr. Sinwar as the unquestioned leader of Hamas, after which ceasefire negotiations came to an almost complete halt. The death of Mr. Sinwar raises the question of who now commands Hamas fighters on the ground in Gaza and who speaks for the group on the international stage.
Mr. Sinwar’s 49-year-old brother, Mohammed, a senior military commander, is considered by Israeli analysts to be his most likely successor inside Gaza. Khaled Meshaal, a former political leader of Hamas who retired in 2017 and was succeeded by Mr. Haniyeh, is the most prominent Hamas figure outside Gaza.
Mr. Meshaal divides his time between Egypt and Qatar, two countries that, along with the United States, have sought for the past year to mediate between Israel and Hamas.
On Thursday, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, an umbrella group representing friends and relatives of the Israelis and foreigners being held in Gaza, welcomed the apparent death of Mr. Sinwar, “who masterminded the greatest massacre our country has ever faced,” and added an appeal for all sides to focus on bringing the last of the Oct. 7 hostages home. The group launched an immediate protest across the street from Israel’s military headquarters in Tel Aviv.
Meanwhile, the violence in Gaza continued, with at least 28 people killed in an Israeli air strike Thursday that struck a school in the northern city of Jabalia that was being used as a shelter for Palestinians displaced by the fighting. Israel said it targeted the school as a meeting place of Hamas.
With a report from Nuha Musleh in Ramallah, West Bank