Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar killed, Israel says

Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas and the architect of the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel, was killed Thursday during an Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip, according to the military.

“Eliminated: Yahya Sinwar,” the Israeli military posted on the social platform X shortly before 1 p.m. Thursday, after NewsNation reported his death in the morning.

The military and Shin Bet, the country’s internal security service, released a statement confirming some details of the operation.

“Yahya Sinwar was eliminated after hiding for the past year behind the civilian population of Gaza, both above and below ground in Hamas tunnels in the Gaza Strip,” it said. “The dozens of operations carried out by the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] and the ISA 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.”

Sinwar was Israel’s top target in Gaza, but he survived in Hamas’s underground tunnel network for more than a year as the war of his making raged above.  

A messianic psychopath is how one U.S. official described Sinwar. Among Hamas leadership, he was viewed as “a nasty guy,” said one analyst. As an enforcer in the 1980s, he earned the moniker “Butcher of Khan Yunis.”

Sinwar viewed tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in a war with Israel “as necessary sacrifices” to achieve his goal of destroying the Jewish state. That appeared to be the inspiration for Hamas launching the attack against Israel on Oct. 7: committing a massacre of such brutality that it would trigger a massive Israeli response. 

“For Netanyahu, a victory would be even worse than a defeat,” Sinwar told an Italian journalist in 2018, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to a profile by The Wall Street Journal.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at the time that the “depravity defies comprehension” in viewing the aftermath of the 1,200 people killed on Oct. 7. Of the 250 people taken hostage, about 101 hostages remain in Hamas captivity.  

Dubbed a “dead man walking” by Israel’s military in the aftermath of the attack, Sinwar evaded Israeli forces by hiding among the armed group’s subterranean tunnel system; surrounding himself with hostages; and communicating through letter-writing to avoid electronic detection. 

Believed to be between 61 and 63 years old, Sinwar came of age in the Gaza Strip during the 1967 Six-day War, when Israel captured the Strip from Egypt, and during the first intifada, or uprising, against Israel, in the 1980s. Raised in a refugee camp, Sinwar joined the burgeoning Hamas movement, charged with hunting down and killing suspected Palestinian informants to Israel. 

He was arrested by Israeli forces in 1988 and given four life sentences for the abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers. But his time in jail served as an education to understand his enemy, learning the Hebrew language and studying Israeli culture and politics. He published a novel in 2004 that centered on themes of oppression and resistance. 

Sinwar had his life saved in prison, when an Israeli dentist signaled that he had something wrong with his brain and rushed him into emergency surgery. But he showed no easing of his religious fervor to liberate what he viewed as Islamic land. 

He was released from prison in 2011, one of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners released in exchange for one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, whom Hamas held hostage for five years. 

Sinwar’s life experience would help write the blueprint for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack. In 2012, Hamas demonstrated for the first time that its rocket arsenal could hit Tel Aviv, as part of a short but critical war that laid out a pattern of escalation between Hamas and Israel, and negotiation for periods of calm. Similar scenarios would be repeated in 2014, 2018 and 2021. 

The Israeli security establishment, under the leadership of Netanyahu during this time, began to refer to these operations as “mowing the lawn.” It’s that sense of control that critics say lulled Israel’s intelligence into complacency ahead of Oct. 7, despite warnings from young, female intelligence observers that a major attack was being prepared.  

Sinwar’s death marks a major operational success for the Israeli military and an ongoing psychological blow to Israel’s adversaries of Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iran — where the most senior leaders and their years of experience and operational knowledge have been picked off one by one.

This includes Hezbollah’s longtime chief Hassan Nasrallah, killed in a bomb strike in September; the assassination of his successors; and the assassination of top Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh at a guesthouse in Tehran in July. Israel allegedly killed Hamas’s No. 3 official, Saleh al-Arouri, in Beirut in January. 

It’s unclear how Sinwar’s absence from the battlefield will impact Israel’s plans to eliminate Hamas completely from the Gaza Strip, and whether it will change the dynamics of hostage talks that have stalled for months, Israel’s operations in Lebanon or plans to respond to recent attacks from Iran.

Updated at 1:06 p.m. EDT