Six days after 9/11, President George W. Bush gathered with his cabinet for a meeting on how the United States planned to respond to the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. The man at the top of Washington’s target list was none other than al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden. “I want justice,” Bush told the reporters assembled before the meeting began. “And there’s an old poster out West … I recall, that said, ‘Wanted, Dead or Alive.’”
Twenty-two years and three months later, Israel is using similar language as it seeks to hunt down and kill Yehya Sinwar, the 61-year-old leader of Hamas in Gaza and an architect of the biggest attack on Israel since the state was founded in 1948. A spokesman for the Israeli military has called Sinwar “a dead man walking.” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has vowed that the entire Hamas leadership, Sinwar included, will be wiped out. “We will get to Yehya Sinwar and eliminate him,” he said last month. “If the residents of Gaza get there ahead of us, that will shorten the war.”
The Israel Defense Forces are well on their way. Israeli ground operations expanded to the south of Gaza weeks ago, an area of the enclave even more populated than Gaza City. The priority is Khan Younis, a city bursting at the seams with Palestinians who were displaced from the north and who are now being ordered to move yet again, this time toward the Gaza-Egypt border. As Israeli troops make their way through the city, Sinwar and the rest of Hamas’ political and military hierarchy are trying to remain elusive. While the Israelis don’t know Sinwar’s exact location, they suspect that he’s sitting somewhere in the terrorist group’s underground tunnel system. And he’s still giving orders; Sinwar signed off on the weeklong humanitarian truce with Israel in late November.
Israel believes that killing Sinwar will shorten the war and make its quest to destroy Hamas easier. A shorter war would obviously be in Israel’s interest. The country is being excoriated at the United Nations for plunging Gaza into hell on earth and for killing far too many civilians in the course of its military operations. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was so concerned about Gaza’s humanitarian situation that he invoked Article 99 of the U.N. Charter, which permits him to unilaterally elevate an issue to the Security Council’s immediate attention. (This was the first time this specific article was used since 1971.)
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