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.
