Yahya Sinwar Killed in Combat with Israeli Forces in Gaza

Maureen Clare Murphy 

17 October 2024

Yahya Sinwar, then head of Hamas in Gaza, greets supporters during a rally in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, in May 2021. Ashraf AmraAPA images

The Israeli military announced on Thursday that it killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

Sinwar was reportedly killed on Wednesday by ground troops who did not realize they were engaged with Israel’s most-wanted man, apparently having no prior intelligence of his location.

Israel’s police claimed that “dental records and fingerprints have allowed definitive identification of Sinwar’s remains,” Reuters reported.

Graphic images and videos purportedly showing Sinwar’s body were published by Israeli media.

Hamas has not confirmed or denied the death of Sinwar, widely viewed as the mastermind of the 7 October 2023 surprise attack that devastated the Israeli army’s southern command and forever shattered the myth of Israeli military invincibility.

Sinwar succeeded Ismail Haniyeh as Hamas leader after the latter was killed in July in Tehran, where he was a guest for the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.

Though it has never confirmed or denied responsibility, Israel is believed to have killed Haniyeh, who was the chief Palestinian interlocutor in negotiations to release captives held by Hamas and other groups in Gaza and end the catastrophic Israeli offensive in the territory.

Late last month, Israel assassinated Hizballah Secretary-General Hasan Nasrallah in a massive bombing attack in the southern suburbs of Beirut and has killed several other founding leaders of the Lebanese resistance organization.

Maximum pressure on the resistance

Israel, with the full support of the US, has pursued a strategy of maximum pressure to destroy both Hamas and Hizballah, killing at least 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza and more than 2,400 people in Lebanon over the past year.

The US has blocked efforts for a ceasefire in Gaza by invoking its veto multiple times at the UN Security Council and instead offered draft resolutions calling for a temporary pause in fighting in Gaza that would allow the release of Israeli and foreign captives held in the territory.

After vetoing a draft resolution calling for a ceasefire in early December last year, US deputy ambassador Robert Wood said an end to the Israeli offensive “would only plant the seeds for the next war, because Hamas has no desire to see a durable peace, to see a two-state solution.”

What he really meant was that the US doesn’t support any diplomatic track allowing for Hamas to remain as the de facto governing authority in Gaza.

The US likewise appears to want nothing less than a total capitulation by Hizballah in Lebanon. The Lebanese resistance group reiterated this week that only an agreement to end the genocide in Gaza would bring quiet to Israel’s so-called northern front and allow colonists from evacuated settlements to return to their homes.

Washington is so committed to the eradication of the resistance groups that it is risking a military confrontation with Iran and is sending troops to operate an advanced missile defense system to supplement Israel’s own inadequate defenses against long-range projectiles.

Abbas Araqchi, Iran’s foreign minister, warned that Washington was endangering the lives of its troops “by deploying them to operate US missile systems in Israel.”

US President Joe Biden welcomed the killing of Sinwar, calling it “a good day for Israel, for the United States, and for the world.”

In a statement, Biden said that he had “directed Special Operations personnel and our intelligence professionals to work side-by-side with their Israeli counterparts to help locate and track Sinwar and other Hamas leaders hiding in Gaza.”

He added that with the help of US intelligence, the Israeli military “relentlessly pursued Hamas’ leaders, flushing them out of their hiding places and forcing them onto the run.”

Scores of civilians have been killed in strikes in which Israel claimed to have targeted senior Hamas figures.

In July, around 90 Palestinians were killed in an Israeli airstrike purportedly targeting Muhammad Deif, the shadowy head of the group’s armed wing, in al-Mawasi, an area of southwest Gaza that Israel unilaterally declared as a humanitarian zone.

Day after?

Biden asserted that with the killing of Sinwar, “there is now the opportunity for a ‘day after’ in Gaza without Hamas in power.”

Kamala Harris, the US vice president and Democratic Party presidential candidate, echoed Biden’s statement. Both the president and vice president falsely accused Hamas of perpetrating mass sexual violence on 7 October and erased the context of settler colonization in which the operation occurred by saying it was the single worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust.

Neither has acknowledged that Israel killed hundreds of its own people on 7 October 2023.

Harris said “this moment gives us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza, and it must end such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”

Matthew Miller, the US State Department spokesperson, implicitly acknowledged that there would be no elimination of Hamas as an organization. Blaming Hamas for the suffering of the Palestinian people over the past year, Miller stated that Washington hoped that Sinwar’s successor would “pursue a different path forward.”

But Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, made clear that the war would go on and said that the killing of Sinwar marked “the beginning of the day after Hamas.”

“Today, as we promised we would, we settled accounts with him. Today, evil suffered a heavy blow, but our mission is not yet completed,” Netanyahu said in a video statement.

Addressing the families of Israelis still held in Gaza, Netanyahu added that “this is an important moment in the war. We will continue full force until all your loved ones, our loved ones, are home.”

But some families of the captives held in Gaza said they fear that the killing of Sinwar put their loved ones’ lives in greater danger. Orna and Ronen Neutra, the parents of a captive with Israeli and US citizenship, called on both governments to “act swiftly and do whatever is needed to reach a deal with the captors.”

Benny Gantz, the Israeli opposition leader and former member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet, congratulated the soldiers who killed Sinwar and said that the military “will continue to operate in the Gaza Strip for years to come.”

Legendary status

Israeli propagandists may have thought that publishing photos and videos of Sinwar’s last moments and his lifeless body would instill feelings of defeat and humiliation among supporters of the Palestinian resistance.

The images have instead had the opposite effect, and will only cement his already legendary status. They show that Sinwar died in combat like a rank-and-file fighter – in perhaps not his first direct engagement with Israeli troops – rather than accepting exile or being killed in retreat.

Suheib Alassa, an Al Jazeera correspondent, said that “Israeli intelligence and US and British aircraft failed to find a thread that would lead them to Sinwar, who even the smartest war and intelligence experts did not expect to be fighting directly in the battle.”

That Sinwar was on the front lines meant that Hamas fighters were organized and operating under “precise plans, regardless of the commander’s name or location,” according to Alassa.

Military analyst Elijah J. Magnier said that Sinwar’s “decision to remain at the forefront of the conflict highlighted his willingness to share the same risks and sacrifices as the civilians and fighters of Gaza, reinforcing the idea that Hamas’ leaders would not abandon their people in times of hardship.”

Magnier added that the nature of Sinwar’s death “communicates to the people of Gaza that their commanders are as committed as they are and that they too are prepared to face the ultimate sacrifice.”

Sinwar was born in Gaza’s Khan Younis refugee camp in 1962, his family originally hailing from Majdal, renamed Ashkelon after its conquest by Zionist forces in 1948.

Like other resistance leaders who were killed before him, Sinwar said that martyrdom was the greatest gift that the occupation could give him:

Around 20 years ago, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, one of the founders of Hamas, said that he was not deterred by Israeli assassination threats, saying that “if I saw the rocket coming I would jump and hug it,” adding that “if they kill Ahmed Yassin another 100 Ahmed Yassins will grow up.”

“We are not afraid of their threats, and when we get killed it is the happiest day of our lives,” Yassin said, just a few months before he was assassinated in a missile strike in Gaza City in 2004.

Sinwar was a personal assistant to Yassin and spent nearly a quarter of a century in Israeli prison, during which time he learned Hebrew and devoted himself to studying Israeli politics and society while also producing several books and translations related to Israel and Palestinian political strategy.

In 2021, in his last interview – the only sit-down interview he ever gave to an English-language outlet – Sinwar said that with its state-of-the-art weaponry, Israel “intentionally bombs and kills our children and women.”

“You can’t compare that to those who resist and defend themselves with weapons that look primitive in comparison,” he said.

The resistance will defend its people with whatever means it has, according to Sinwar.

“What are we supposed to do? Should we raise the white flag?” he asked rhetorically.

“That’s not going to happen,” he said, and lived up to that promise.