Yahya Sinwar Killed in Gaza
Another one bites the dust.
AP (“Israel confirms Hamas’ leader Yahya Sinwar has been killed in Gaza“):
Israel’s foreign minister has confirmed that Israeli troops in Gaza have killed Hamas’ top leader Yahya Sinwar, a chief architect of the Oct. 7 attack.
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.
Foreign Minister Katz called Sinwar’s killing Wednesday a “military and moral achievement for the Israeli army.”
“The assassination of Sinwar will create the possibility to immediately release the hostages and to bring a change that will lead to a new reality in Gaza – without Hamas and without Iranian control,” he said in a statement Thursday.
WSJ (“Hamas Chief Yahya Sinwar Killed in Gaza, Israel Says“):
Israel on Thursday said it had killed Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, in southern Gaza.
Three militants were killed during operations in a building in the strip on Wednesday, the Israeli military said. Sinwar’s death was confirmed following forensic identification tests, it added.
Sinwar, a U.S.-designated terrorist, triggered a war with Israel in Gaza in October 2023 that has since expanded to a multifront conflict in the Middle East. His death marks the severest blow yet to Hamas in more than a year of war.
The killing of Israel’s most wanted militant is also a major win for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who vowed to destroy Hamas’s leadership and military capabilities in the Gaza Strip.
Hamas didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Sinwar, who has been Hamas’s top leader in Gaza for years, took control of the group’s political bureau in August after Israel killed the previous leader, Ismail Haniyeh, the preceding month.
Sinwar was widely viewed as the architect of the Oct. 7 attacks that killed 1,200 people in southern Israel and led to the kidnapping of around 250 others.
Around 100 hostages remain in captivity in Gaza, including many dead. Talks between Israel and Hamas to secure the release of the remaining hostages have collapsed in recent months, largely due to the intransigence of Sinwar and Netanyahu.
Will this significantly alter the course of the war—or lead to the release of hostages—in the short term? Probably not. But the war was unlikely to end with him alive.
Good riddance.
UPDATE: NYT had an obit in the can (“Yahya Sinwar, Leader of Hamas, Is Dead“).
Yahya Sinwar, the Palestinian militant leader who emerged from two decades of prison in Israel to rise to the helm of Hamas and help plot the deadliest assault on Israel in its history, died on Thursday. He was in his early 60s.
A longtime Hamas leader who assumed its top political office in August, Mr. Sinwar was known among supporters and enemies alike for combining cunning and brutality. He built Hamas’s ability to harm Israel in service of the group’s long-term goal of destroying the Jewish state and building an Islamist, Palestinian nation in its place.
He played a central role in planning the surprise assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed about 1,200 people, brought 250 others back to Gaza as hostages and put him at the top of Israel’s kill list. Israeli leaders vowed to hunt him down, and the military dropped fliers over Gaza offering a $400,000 reward for information on his whereabouts.
But for more than a year, he remained elusive, surviving in tunnels Hamas had dug beneath Gaza, even as Israel killed many of his fighters and associates.
Mr. Sinwar’s legacy among Palestinians is complex. He built a force capable of striking the Middle East’s most sophisticated military despite the tight Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Gaza. But the Oct. 7 attack led Israel to commit not just to ending Hamas’s 17-year rule of Gaza, but also to destroying the group altogether.
The assault raised Hamas’s standing in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and elsewhere in the Arab world, according to polls, but not among Gazans, whose lives and homes bore the brunt of Israel’s subsequent invasion.
And while he succeeded at bringing the Palestinian cause back to the world’s attention, he failed to bring his people closer to independence or statehood — and at a tremendous cost to those whom he claimed to want to liberate. Israel reduced much of Gaza to rubble in response to Hamas’s attack, and more than 42,000 Palestinians were killed, according to the Gaza health authorities.
When word of his death spread in Gaza, many people celebrated.
Mohammed, a 22-year-old who had been repeatedly displaced during the war, said he blamed Mr. Sinwar for the hunger, unemployment and homelessness the conflict had caused.
“He humiliated us, started the war, scattered us and made us displaced, without water, food or money,” Mohammed said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from Hamas members. “He is the one who made Israel do this.”
The news of Mr. Sinwar’s death, he said, marked “the best day of my life.”
As the leader of Hamas in Gaza from 2017 to 2024, Mr. Sinwar quietly rekindled the group’s relationship with Iran, a longtime patron, helping Hamas develop the ability to outsmart Israel’s defenses. And while covertly preparing for a giant war with Israel, he led Israel to believe that he wanted the opposite: not exactly peace, but at least some quiet.
May his death be a blessing.
Wow. Apparently not a good idea to fuck with Israel. Ali Khamenei is cowering in a basement tonight.
@Michael Reynolds: Given the lapse of time since the last Iranian missile attack on Israel, I can only surmise that they’re planning something of considerably larger scale than the last exchange, which was almost instantaneous.
@James Joyner:
Israel has said they won’t hit oil facilities or nuke facilities. So something big against the IRG. Or, a decapitation attack?
Sinwar has managed to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah and humiliated Iran not to mention a fair number of his own people.
The question now is whether Hamas kills the hostages.
You know, I read this and I wonder if this means that things will start dialing down – deescalating. But then I think “Nah”. There’s too much honor culture involved.
@Jay L Gischer:
This would be a convenient spot for a suspension of hostilities, but that won’t happen.
I’d like to believe that this represents an offramp. Pull out, get the hostages back, and leave Gaza in ruins with the rest of the world holding the bag.
Also, for whatever it is worth, social media was just blasting images of his body with a terrible head wound. I’m an adult and I’ve seen worse, but the casual indecency of showing without warning pictures of violence against the Other is not a good sign.
Also: USAF B-2’s today stuck Houthi targets in Yemen; apparently missile storage sites.
That’s both probably a useful hit in itself, and a pretty direct message to both Houthis and Tehran: push this play much further and the US will take decisive action.
Follows a rather little-reported US and UK strike on 4 October.
Using B-2’s is a step up the ladder.
@Michael Reynolds:
My current guess is a rolling attack on IRG command and missiles, probably including manufacture and storage sites.
But the IDF are not giving anything away, so I could well be wrong.
We’ll find out when the IDF have degraded the Hezbollah missile capability to their satisfaction. Probably not very long.
@Michael Reynolds: Sinwar has not managed to destroy Hezbullah, he has managed to set in motion sheer idiocy but both Hamas and Hezbullah remain – Hezbullah more than Hamas.
crowing about this is like crowingly foolishly over every Talebans leader killed….
Sinwar has achieved derailing any normalisation process which was one of his goals (logical from his PoV) as Israel’s war crimes mode of operation is (unnecessarily) toxic to anyone but… well you Americans.
He also has of course succeeded as well in destroying Gaza, bringing untold more avoidable misery for the Gazans, and the West Bank. He may have succeeded in setting Israeli further on a road to being a full out apartheid state to its long-term own-harm. This is sad.
I shed not one tear for Sinwar, but adolescent action movie triumphalism is sheer foolishness. Sinwar has sadly succeeded in half of his ideological goals as the Netanyahuist-Hamas dance continues.
@Michael Reynolds:
I don’t like the hostages chances.
I think oil assets vs nuclear assets are more in danger. “We can cripple your terrorist leadership infrastructure. We can cripple your economic lifeblood, and cause civil unrest.” If I’m wrong, and they go after nuclear, it’s a take a pause offering.
@Lounsbury: Yes. He’s dead, but he died winning. I’m glad he’s dead, but much like bin Laden, he died having done what he set out to accomplish. It would have been far better to leave them alive, having not managed to do untold amounts of damage to what we consider modernity.
Great news. Sadly it took a year, but Sinwar was the one guy that absolutely had to die for this to end.
@Sleeping Dog: Doesn’t Bibi get turned out of office and prosecuted at hostilities end? Strong incentive for continuing, seems to me.
Was it worth killing tens of thousands of other people.
@Lounsbury:
I’m so tired of that defeatist bullshit. We killed Osama, and where is Al Qaeda? Had we killed Stalin, what, no change? Hitler? For that matter, DeGaulle? Churchill? Are Muslim terrorists uniquely magical?
The fact is Al Qaeda is fucked and ISIS is fucked, and now so are Hamas and Hezbollah. The idea that decapitation has no effect is magical thinking. Killing Rabin mattered. Killing Lincoln mattered. Killing JFK mattered. Yeah, the Taliban survived, but that was about geography more than anything.
Gaza is rubble. They will remain rubble til they make a deal with Israel. Hezbollah and Hamas and ISIS and Al Qaeda can all posture and make brave speeches, but for the near term, they are, what’s the word? Fucked.
@Kevin:
No. Sinwar set out to destroy Israel. Is Israel destroyed? And Bin Laden set out to destroy American influence in the ME and end the various Arab monarchies. Is MBS still in power? Are we still in the ME? Yes. So, no, they both died as failures.
@Kathy:
No, but still good riddance to him. It’s good news.
Was bin Laden’s death worth our Iraq misadventure, our endless Afghan War, and ~4.5 million dead civilians? No. But it was still good news, even if it could not erase our screwups.
He will not be missed.
@just nutha:
That explains Bibi’s likely behavior, Hamas and Hezbollah each have their own.
@Michael Reynolds:
We were never able to kill most of the senior leadership in the Taliban – the “Quetta Shura” – which survived in Pakistan. We were very good at killing the leaders below them and AQ, but most of the principles were untouchable thanks to sanctuary in Pakistan, including probably direct assistance from the Pakistani government. As I recall, there were never any drone strikes in Quetta, which is where the leadership was holed up, probably because Pakistan would not allow it. Those leaders who survived are now the government and senior leadership of Afghanistan. Leadership does matter.
Hamas, at this point, is effectively destroyed as a coherent organization. There are still many Hamas members and some fighters, and the remnants will probably reform into something as new leaders emerge or potentially dissolve into competing groups. Hamas made a lot of money through controlling aid in Gaza, and much of that capability remains – a prize to be taken.
There is also PIJ, which reportedly has several hostages and hasn’t been hit as hard as Hamas. They could expand, unless Israel finishes off their leaders.
As for the hostages, it’s not clear what will happen there. Israel is already hinting at immunity if they are handed over. I’m doubtful that the offer will be taken, but Israel may start to get better intel from informants as some members see the writing on the wall.