It was a short, stern, matter-of-fact message from the Israeli Defense Forces — “Eliminated: Yahya Sinwar.” The man the Israeli military establishment was searching for throughout Gaza’s alleyways, underground tunnels and blasted-out buildings for more than a year, responsible for the worst terrorist attack on Israel since the founding of the state, is now dead and gone. Sinwar becomes the latest in a long line of Hamas leaders and commanders — Ahmed Yassin, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh, to name a few — who have eventually met their fate at Israel’s hand.
Sinwar, however, often made the others look like conciliatory men. The sixty-something-year-old Palestinian, born in a Gaza refugee camp, lived and breathed Hamas for his entire adult life. He joined the movement at its founding in the late 1980s and headed up its internal security unit, where he was particularly ruthless in snuffing out potential Israeli collaborators within the Palestinian population. In one especially heinous incident, he ordered one Palestinian man to bury his brother alive for his transgressions. Sinwar was captured in 1988 and sent to an Israeli prison for about two decades, a formative period in his life and a stay that merely redoubled his commitment to the cause of destroying Israel. By the time he left prison in 2011 as part of a massive prisoner release deal (Israel let 1,000 Palestinian prisoners go free in exchange for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit), Sinwar’s status within Hamas was on the upswing.
For Israelis across the political divide, Sinwar was their version of Osama bin Laden — an evil, soulless man who thought of nothing about killing innocents. The October 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Southern Israel was as coordinated and is was inhumane. From that day forward, Sinwar became enemy number one for Israel’s military and intelligence complex, above and beyond Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah and Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. While the year-long Israeli military campaign in Gaza may be geared toward two big objectives — destroying Hamas as a military and governing force and freeing the remaining Israeli hostages — taking Sinwar off the board was no doubt front-of-mind for every Israeli soldier, intelligence officer and counterterrorism operator deployed to Gaza. If last month’s assassination of Hassan Nasrallah was an intelligence coup for Israel, the killing of Yahya Sinwar was cold-stone justice.
Author
Daniel
DePetris
Fellow
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