Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar confirmed killed in Gaza

BEIRUT — Yahya Sinwar, the alleged mastermind of the Hamas-led onslaught of just over a year ago in southern Israel that triggered a devastating war, was killed by Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip, Israeli officials said Thursday.

Sinwar’s killing in an apparently surprise encounter with Israeli forces is the culmination of a yearlong hunt — involving Israeli and American spy agencies — for the Hamas leader, who was believed to be hiding in the group’s underground network of tunnels in Gaza.

Israel accused Sinwar of planning the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in which Hamas-led attackers broke through the Gaza fence and stormed a string of Israeli farming communities and an open-air music festival, killing about 1,200 Israelis and seizing some 250 hostages.

The remains of the slain militant reportedly underwent DNA testing and were compared with samples of Sinwar’s genetic material collected during his long incarceration in Israeli jails.

There was no immediate comment from Hamas, whose leadership ranks had already been devastated by the July 31 assassination in Tehran of its political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, and by an airstrike in Gaza that killed Sinwar’s top deputy, Mohammed Deif.

Sinwar’s demise could provide an opening for a negotiated end to the war in Gaza, which has killed about 42,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, triggered an enormous humanitarian crisis and left much of the seaside territory in ruins.

While Israel has come under overwhelming international condemnation for civilian suffering, including accusations of war crimes, U.S. and Israeli officials held Sinwar largely responsible for bringing death and destruction on Palestinians and thwarting a cease-fire and hostage-release deal. Sinwar, they said, repeatedly rejected overtures to end the conflict.

“He treated his own people, the Palestinians of Gaza, as if they were all ready to be martyrs — only he never asked them if they wanted to be martyrs,” veteran Middle East diplomat Dennis Ross said on the social media platform X. “With the Hamas leaders in Gaza gone, Israel should say it will end the war, provided the hostages are released.”

The initial statement from the Israeli military and the Shin Bet security agency — which preceded the confirmation of Sinwar’s death by several hours — said there was no sign that any Israeli hostages were in the area at the time. Of the hostages captured in southern Israel, fewer than 70 are thought to remain alive in Gaza.

On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called upon Hamas militants to lay down their weapons and free remaining hostages.

“Those who do not, their days are numbered,” Netanyahu said. Hamas “suffered a harsh blow, but we have not finished our task.”

Other analysts warned that Sinwar’s death may not bring about dramatic changes in the conflict.

“Killing leaders of a large insurgent-terrorist group does not make the group disappear,” said Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and senior advisor to the security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. “There is always a subordinate willing to step up. However, there are damaging near- and mid-term effects ... as the new leader establishes control over the organization.”

U.S. intelligence officials had been working closely with Israel to locate Sinwar as well as hostages. But there was no immediate indication that U.S. information led to his killing, the State Department said.

Sinwar, born in 1962, was a native of the Khan Yunis refugee camp in Gaza. His involvement with Hamas dated to the late 1980s, soon after the militant group was first formed. He made his name in the organization as a brutal internal enforcer, rooting out suspected spies and collaborators with Israel.

Sentenced in 1989 to four life sentences for the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers and a number of Palestinians he suspected of collaboration, Sinwar served 22 years in Israeli prison.

In prison, Sinwar became fluent in Hebrew and proved an astute observer of Israeli politics. He survived a bout with brain cancer — his symptoms first spotted by a prison dentist, with his subsequent successful treatment carried out in Israel.

His jailhouse interrogators — interviewed often in Israeli media about their experiences with him — described a figure who was intellectually curious, utterly ruthless and unyielding in his belief that Israel must be destroyed.

He was released in a lopsided 2011 prisoner exchange, in which 1,000 Palestinians were freed from Israeli jails in exchange for a single Israeli soldier who had been captured and held in Gaza.

That Sinwar survived this long was a source of huge frustration for Israel, whose intelligence services in the past have proved lethally adept at targeting other leaders of Hamas and other Iranian-backed proxy groups such as Hezbollah.

Sinwar proved prescient in his mistrust of any electronic devices — which were used as a devastating weapon last month against operatives of Hezbollah.

The Hamas leader relied instead on a tight and secretive network of couriers who hand-relayed messages to him, and conveyed his responses.

While that clandestine mode of communication undoubtedly helped keep Sinwar alive over the months of intense Israeli attacks on Gaza, it also built long delays into negotiations taking place over a number of months, when the United States, intermediaries such as Egypt and Qatar, as well as Sinwar’s own allies, awaited his response.

At least one group of hostages had a startling encounter with Sinwar early in their captivity.

A former hostage named Margalit Mozes — released in November 2023 as part of a temporary cease-fire and hostage-prisoner exchange — described the Hamas chief’s unexpected entry, with an entourage, to a section of tunnels where she was being held. She recognized him immediately, Mozes said, and he acknowledged his identity, addressing her in fluent Hebrew.

Mozes, who was 77 at the time, said she demanded to know the point of seizing her and other civilians, especially elderly people, from Israeli communities near Gaza that were attacked. She told Israeli news outlets that Sinwar confidently informed her that there was no reason to be afraid, and that the hostages were only to be used as bargaining chips.

One stint of Sinwar’s lengthy imprisonment took place in Ashkelon, an Israeli town just outside Gaza where Sinwar’s parents had lived before being forced to flee their home in the aftermath of Israel’s war of independence in 1948.

Accounts from those who interacted with him during that time said he liked to go barefoot when allowed out into the prison yard, saying he wanted his feet to touch the ground of what he called his rightful homeland.