Eliminated: How Israel killed the Hamas mastermind of terror, Yahya Sinwar
For more than a year, Israeli soldiers scoured the scorched earth of Gaza in search of Yahya Sinwar, who was thought to be hiding in a vast tunnel network. Then, by pure chance, they found him.
For more than a year, Israeli soldiers scoured the scorched earth of Gaza in search of the leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, who was thought to be hiding in a vast tunnel network. Then, by chance, they found him.
Late on Wednesday in the southern city of Rafah, trainee Israeli troops from the 828th Battalion, a mixture of novice soldiers and reservists, spotted three suspicious figures moving “home to home on the run”, the military said.
The soldiers fired on the group, apparently wounding one of them, who fled alone into a building. They sent in a small drone in pursuit, and through its camera saw a figure sitting among debris, his face covered by a scarf, who hurled a stick at it in defiance.
Deciding it was too dangerous to enter, they called in tank fire instead. The building was hit by two 120mm shells, with shrapnel scything across the upper floors.
When the trainee soldiers piloted a drone back into the wreckage, they discovered something remarkable.
Entombed in the rubble was a body. The head was partially shattered, the face covered in ash, but the corpse was instantly recognisable: it was Israel’s No 1 enemy. His lips slightly parted in death, Sinwar, 61, was given away by his distinctive ears.
Even though it looked exactly like him, it seemed scarcely believable that the troops would stumble across the leader of Hamas in the middle of a city repeatedly cleared by the Israel Defence Forces over months of heavy fighting. Soldiers from the 450th infantry battalion were ordered to storm the building for a closer look.
Wearing gloves to protect the forensic evidence, they took pictures of the corpse, wearing combat fatigues, and sent them to the Israeli police. Specifically, they needed to get images of his yellowing teeth.
Using a wooden stick, they pushed back the man’s upper lip to reveal an identifiable gap between his front incisors. Investigators had the Hamas leader’s DNA from the 22 years he spent in Israeli jails. “We had Sinwar’s dental data on file, and the match was clear,” Aliza Raziel, head of the police’s Forensic Identification Division, said, describing it as “one of the most significant moments this year”.
The seismic discovery was quickly communicated up the chain of command until, in the skies above Israel, two of its most senior security officials held an impromptu meeting in a military helicopter to assess the information. Examining classified documents spread out on a makeshift table, Herzi Halevi, Israel’s top general, and Ronen Bar, head of Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence agency, pored over the details of Sinwar’s apparent assassination.
At the same time, grisly photos of Sinwar’s corpse were leaked online, forcing the IDF to issue a statement. By this stage they were confident enough to assert with a “high” degree of confidence that Sinwar was dead. Four hours later, the military issued a simple message on social media: “Eliminated: Yahya Sinwar.”
Unlike the planned assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, in Beirut last month, it appears that Sinwar’s demise owed much more to luck than design. Releasing drone footage of Sinwar’s last moments, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, the IDF spokesman, confirmed the soldiers “identified him as a terrorist in a building” but did not know who it was.
“We fired on the building and went in to search. We found him with a flak jacket and a gun and 40,000 shekels [pounds 8,200],” he added.
Sinwar began terrorising the people of Gaza in the 1980s, when as head of the al-Majd, the morality police of Hamas, he was responsible for murdering suspected Palestinian collaborators and torturing those accused of supposed sins such as homosexuality or indulging in vices such as alcohol, drugs and fornication.
As rumours spread in Gaza of his demise, Palestinians expressed tentative hope that his death would mark the beginning of the end of the war, after another bloody day in which 28 people were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a school in Jabalia in the north.
Displaced from his home, Osama al-Kafarna, 43, now living in Khan Yunis, blamed both Sinwar for starting the war and Israel for its retributive, year-long campaign that has left more than 42,000 dead, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
“Israel has always accused Sinwar of being the one who obstructs the deal, but now after his death we hope that we will not hear more lies from Israel and the war will end as soon as possible,” he said.
For Israelis and Palestinians alike, Sinwar’s death is a decisive moment. At least 97 hostages remain unaccounted for, 33 of whom are believed to be dead. And it remains unclear how Israel intends to quash the radical Sunni ideology that fuels Hamas.
“We’ve closed the account with the arch murderer Sinwar,” said Einav Zangauker, the mother of the hostage Matan Zangauker and one of the most vocal campaigners for a ceasefire, in a video statement. “But now, more than ever, the lives of my son Matan and the other hostages are in tangible danger.”
Israel had claimed that Sinwar had been hiding in tunnels under Gaza, using hostages as human shields. Hagari said he had been “running away” before he died but Hamas will try to paint him as a martyr, defiant to the last.
Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, addressed the nation in a speech intended to capture the history of the moment. “Evil has been delivered a blow,” he said, before adding: “But our task is not yet complete.”
The Times
