Israel has said that it has killed Hamas’ top leader Yahya Sinwar in a battle with its forces in Gaza. The Israeli military has confirmed that “after a year-long pursuit, yesterday (Wednesday), October 16, 2024, IDF (military) soldiers from the Southern Command eliminated Yahya Sinwar, the leader of the Hamas terrorist organisation, in an operation in the southern Gaza Strip,” it said in a statement. Reacting to the news, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that “evil suffered severe blow” with Sinwar’s death. “Today we have settled the score. Today evil has been dealt a blow but our task has still not been completed,” Netanyahu said in a recorded video statement.
“The dozens of operations carried out by the IDF and the ISA (Shin Bet internal security agency) over the last year, and in recent weeks in the area where he was eliminated, restricted Yahya Sinwar’s operational movement as he was pursued by the forces and led to his elimination,” the Israeli military said. “IDF soldiers of the 828th Brigade (Bislach) operating in the area identified and eliminated three terrorists. After completing the process of identifying the body, it can be confirmed that Yahya Sinwar was eliminated”.
Sinwar has topped Israel’s most wanted list since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war just over a year ago, and his killing strikes a powerful blow to the militant group. There was no immediate confirmation from Hamas of his death.
The Israeli military confirmed Sinwar’s death after conducting DNA and other tests on a body that it said was among three militants killed on Wednesday, October 16, during operations in Gaza. Foreign Minister Katz called Sinwar’s killing a “military and moral achievement for the Israeli army,” saying it would “create the possibility to immediately release the hostages.”
Israel accuses Sinwar, 61, of being the mastermind of the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the ongoing war, along with Hamas’s military chief Mohammed Deif. The Israeli military has said Deif was killed in a strike earlier this year though the Palestinian group has not confirmed it. Sinwar in August replaced Hamas’s former chief Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in Iran on July 31. Israel has not commented on Haniyeh’s death.
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Israel’s President Isaac Herzog on Thursday called for swift action to bring back hostages held in Gaza, as he hailed the killing of Yahya Sinwar by Israeli forces. Herzog on social media platform X said the slain Hamas chief was the mastermind of the October 7, 2023 attack that triggered the ongoing war and “has for years been responsible for heinous acts of terrorism against Israeli civilians”, also calling on Israeli leaders to “act in every way possible to bring back” the remaining hostages.
Earlier on October 17, Thursday, Palestinian officials reported at least 28 people were dead, including four children, in an Israeli strike on a school being used as a shelter in Gaza. Nearly 100 people were wounded in the strike in Jabaliya, according to the Gaza Health Ministry’s emergency unit in the north.
Sinwar had been in Israel’s crosshairs and deep in hiding since the October 7, 2023, assault that outfoxed the country’s security establishment and reshaped global geopolitics. Hamas members who swarmed into southern Israel that day killed about 1,200 people and abducted about 250 others, scores of whom also died within hours or in subsequent months of captivity.
Israel had offered Sinwar safe passage out of Gaza if Hamas would free all remaining hostages and give up control of the strip. By most accounts, however, Sinwar saw Israel’s sustained retaliatory war on Hamas as a strategic triumph, if a painful one. “We have the Israelis right where we want them,” he said in a message to Hamas negotiators, the Wall Street Journal reported in June.
Who is Sinwar?
Compact and wiry, with a white head of hair and closely cropped beard, Sinwar became the face of Hamas. Born in 1962 in a refugee camp in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis (his precise date of birth wasn’t clear), he attended the Islamic University of Gaza and helped found the military wing of Hamas in the late 1980s as the first Palestinian uprising against Israel was under way.
He worked with his younger brother, Mohammad, and was close to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, which began as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas’s vow to destroy Israel distinguished the group from the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had started to come to terms with Israel’s existence.
Sinwar took on the task of rooting out Palestinians thought to be collaborating with Israel. Israeli military authorities, who were operating inside Gaza, arrested him in 1989 and sentenced him to life in prison. He was single at the time and told his interrogators he was married to the Palestinian cause. Years later, after prison, he married and had a son and daughter.
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He spent 22 years in Israeli prisons, learning to speak fluent Hebrew and gaining insight into Israeli society by reading newspapers and biographies of key Israeli figures. He also became the uncontested leader of Hamas prisoners, an important role within the group’s hierarchy. Officials who’d tracked and interrogated him described him as a cold-blooded, magnetic leader who inspired fear.
In the early 2000s, during his imprisonment, Sinwar began experiencing headaches and blurred vision. He was taken to a hospital where a brain tumor was removed, saving his life. In 2011, when Israel sought to free one of its soldiers held in Gaza by Hamas, Sinwar got involved in negotiating a list of more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners to exchange for him. His name was among them.
Since he was no longer young, many Israeli security officials didn’t object to his release. But he rejoined Hamas at a senior level and by 2017 was its chief in Gaza. He quickly began a campaign to spread the idea that he wanted stability, a truce with Israel rather than combat, and his goal was societal prosperity.
(With inputs from agencies)
