Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who orchestrated the Palestinian group’s brutal attack on Israel that triggered war in the Gaza Strip, has been killed, according to Israel’s military. He was thought to be 61 or 62.

He was one of three “terrorists” killed on Wednesday in an Israel Defense Forces operation in the south of Gaza, the military said. Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, had earlier said that the killing occurred today.

“The State of Israel has brought justice with the elimination of Yahya Sinwar – a vile murderer and terrorist,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said.

Sinwar had been in Israel’s crosshairs and deep in hiding since the Oct. 7, 2023, assault that outfoxed the country’s security establishment and reshaped global geopolitics. Hamas militants who swarmed into southern Israel that day killed about 1,200 people and abducted about 250 others, scores of whom also died within hours or in subsequent months of captivity.

Israel had offered Sinwar safe passage out of Gaza if Hamas would free all remaining hostages and give up control of the strip. By most accounts, however, Sinwar saw Israel’s sustained retaliatory war on Hamas as a strategic triumph, if a painful one.

“We have the Israelis right where we want them,” he said in a message to Hamas negotiators, the Wall Street Journal reported in June.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had said Sinwar “doesn’t care about his people and acts like a little Hitler in a bunker.”

Designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and European Union, Hamas is dedicated to Israel’s destruction and has ruled Gaza, an isolated Mediterranean enclave that’s home to 2.2 million Palestinians, since 2007. Sinwar had run Hamas in Gaza since 2017 and took on the added role of the group’s political leader following the July killing of Ismail Haniyeh during a visit to Iran, a hit blamed on Israeli intelligence.

Years of planning

In the years before the Oct. 7 assault, Sinwar had led a cunning campaign to persuade Israeli authorities that he’d given up on militancy to focus on governing the impoverished coastal strip with international donations and securing jobs for its people in Israel. “I don’t want war anymore. I want a cease-fire,” he told an Italian journalist in 2018. “We can be like Singapore, like Dubai.”

All the while, he was preparing what became the deadliest attack in Israel’s history.

On Oct. 7, some 3,000 Hamas operatives crossed into Israel for their long-prepared and well-rehearsed killing and abduction spree. In some of his early messages from hiding, Sinwar told associates that the brutality of the attack, including its targeting of Israeli women and children, had surprised him. “Things went out of control,” Sinwar said in one of his messages, the Journal reported. “People got caught up in this, and that should not have happened.”

The Israeli military hit back with air raids and a ground invasion that over the following year reduced much of Gaza to rubble. Around 42,000 people have been killed by Israel’s operations in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry there, which doesn’t distinguish between civilian and combatant casualties.

Prior to the conflict, Israel had seemed well on its way to building an alliance with Saudi Arabia and integrating itself into a regional leadership position without addressing the Palestinian question. The war elevated the Palestinian situation into a top global concern.

As the war began, Sinwar disappeared into the sprawling tunnel network under Gaza, where, according to Israeli authorities, he likely surrounded himself with hostages for his protection. From the tunnels, and taking measures to avoid detection by Israeli surveillance, Sinwar commanded the fight against Israel and represented Hamas in the months-long failed negotiations over a cease-fire and hostage-exchange deal.

At one point, Israeli soldiers entered a tunnel where they said Sinwar had been recently staying. Weapons and piles of cash were abandoned in his haste to escape, according to the military, and the coffee on the table was still warm.

Refugee camp

Compact and wiry, with a white head of hair and closely cropped beard, Sinwar became the face of Hamas. Born in 1962 in a refugee camp in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis — his precise date of birth wasn’t clear — he attended the Islamic University of Gaza and helped found the military wing of Hamas in the late 1980s as the first Palestinian uprising against Israel was under way.

He worked with his younger brother, Mohammad, and was close to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, which began as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Hamas’s vow to destroy Israel distinguished the group from the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had started to come to terms with Israel’s existence.

Sinwar took on the task of rooting out Palestinians thought to be collaborating with Israel and personally killed a number of them. Israeli military authorities, who were operating inside Gaza, arrested him in 1989 and sentenced him to life in prison.

He was single at the time and told his interrogators he was married to the Palestinian cause. Years later, after prison, he married and had a son and daughter.

Learned Hebrew

He spent 22 years in Israeli prisons, learning to speak fluent Hebrew and gaining insight into Israeli society by reading newspapers and biographies of key Israeli figures. He also became the uncontested leader of Hamas prisoners, an important role within the group’s hierarchy. Officials who’d tracked and interrogated him described him as a cold-blooded, magnetic leader who inspired fear.

In the early 2000s, during his imprisonment, Sinwar began experiencing headaches and blurred vision. He was taken to an Israeli hospital where a surgeon removed a brain tumor, saving his life.

Betty Lahat, the prison system’s intelligence chief at the time, said in a TV documentary that she tried to use that event to recruit him as an agent.

“I said, ‘The state of Israel saved your life,’” she said. “I thought I could turn him into one of ours, but he wasn’t interested. He kept talking about the day he would be released. I told him, you’re never getting out. He said there’s a date: God knows it.”

In 2011, when Israel sought to free one of its soldiers held in Gaza by Hamas, Sinwar got involved in negotiating a list of more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners to exchange for him. His name was among them.

Since he was no longer young, many Israeli security officials didn’t object to his release. But he rejoined Hamas at a senior level and by 2017 was its chief in Gaza. He quickly began a campaign to spread the idea that he wanted stability, a truce with Israel rather than combat, and his goal was societal prosperity.

He negotiated enormous financial assistance from Qatar that was facilitated by Netanyahu — who, along with the country’s security establishment, believed Hamas had shifted course and would be pacified with money.

“Sinwar read the Israeli consciousness very well,” said Michael Milshtein, former head of Palestinian research for the military’s intelligence department. “He wanted Israel to believe that Hamas was concentrating on stability in Gaza, promoting civil affairs. He planted this wrong idea in the minds of Israelis.”

West Bank focus

In the years before the Oct. 7 attack, some 18,000 Gazans were given work permits in Israel, bringing home salaries 10 times what they would have earned in Gaza. Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition partners started to focus much more on policing the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, where, unlike in Gaza, Israeli settlers lived.

Following the Hamas assault on their nation, Israeli troops in Gaza discovered a tunnel big enough to accommodate large vehicles that extended almost to the Israeli border. Israeli officials said it had taken years and millions of dollars to build and was meant to facilitate a large-scale attack on Israel. The Journal, which reported the discovery, said a military spokesman called the tunnel “Sinwar’s secret,” referring to both the Hamas leader and his brother Mohammad, who was thought to have led its construction.

Israeli officials, who’d bought into the ruse, felt humiliated after Oct. 7, in particular because the country’s security forces failed to respond promptly or save so many of those killed, abused and kidnapped. That led them to target Sinwar with exceptional zeal, making his capture or death one of the war’s central goals.

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(With assistance from Fares Akram and Chris Miller.)

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