Editorial: Yahya Sinwar's legacy of murder: Hamas leader caused the death of many, including himself

Yahya Sinwar died in the rubble of a wrecked building in the wrecked city of Rafah in the wrecked Gaza Strip, where he ruled as Hamas chieftain and launched the horrific Oct. 7 pogrom on Israel. The destruction of his final hideout and the ruin of Rafah and Gaza was Sinwar’s own doing, as was the war that he began. Add his richly deserved death to the thousands of Israelis and Palestinians who have tragically perished in the more than a year of Sinwar’s war. Jews and Arabs alike were his victims.

This terror master did not meet his end like fellow monsters Osama bin Laden or Qassem Soleimani of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, precisely targeted and eliminated by the Pentagon or Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah or Hamas’ Ismail Haniyeh, both blasted by intricately planned Israeli strikes. No, Sinwar died in an empty booby-trapped building that some ordinary Israeli soldiers were trying to clear of terrorists. They hit the jackpot and Sinwar’s demise is being celebrated out loud by leaders from Jerusalem to Washington to London and quietly in Arab capitals.

With Sinwar’s end and the collapse of the military power of Hamas, the remaining Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza must be released. That will finally finish the war that Sinwar started. He was not only the cause of the hostage crisis, he was the main obstacle to ending it. May his successors in Hamas have more sense and more humanity to save lives of Palestinians and Israelis.

Sinwar was no freedom fighter. He was a savage, murderous gangster. He was imprisoned by Israel in 1988 for murdering four fellow Palestinians, not Israelis. Released in 2011, when Hamas was ruling Gaza, he rose to the top of the terror group’s armed wing.

Oct. 7 was Sinwar’s plan to cause such an intensely painful wound on Israel, by slaughtering 1,200 people and kidnapping 251 others to be dragged into the tunnels of Gaza, that a large war would erupt, to be joined by all of Israel’s enemies. By killing the most Jews in a single day since the Nazi Holocaust, Sinwar got his war, but Hamas has lost, as has Hezbollah, which joined the fight from Lebanon on Oct. 8.

Also losing is Iran, having its two proxy forces on Israel’s border eviscerated and decapitated. And Iran’s own attack on Israel was a failed barrage of ballistic missiles, which Israel will sooner or later reply to.

Iran and its agents of terror have brought misery to the people of Gaza, Israel and Lebanon. The mullahs in Tehran, fearful of the growing circle of peace between Israel and the Arab states, fueled war and destruction. Their war plan is not working as they plotted. Sinwar is dead. Haniyeh is dead. Nasrallah is dead. The commanders and the lower ranks of Hamas and Hezbollah have been shattered. Those losses bode well for peace, but thousands of innocent civilians, Israelis and Arabs, caught in the fighting are to be mourned.

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