The IDF spokesman was clear when we met in Tel Aviv almost two weeks ago. ‘Yahya Sinwar is a dead man walking,’ Lieutenant Colonel (Reserve) Peter Lerner told me. There was no anger in his voice, just certainty.
It was the one-year anniversary of the October 7 atrocities, which Sinwar planned, oversaw and, by all accounts, revelled in. Lerner did add that Israel would consider negotiating with him for the release of the hostages if he left Gaza for Egypt. But it couldn’t, he added, guarantee how long Sinwar’s safety would last.
The answer, it turns out, was ten days. On Thursday evening, Israel confirmed that it had killed him.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the Hamas leader and many more of the group’s other ‘mass murderers’ were found hiding in Rafah, in southern Gaza on the Egyptian border.
In truth, it was clear that Sinwar was dead before official confirmation came. Photos of his dust-smothered corpse encased in rubble and surrounded by six IDF soldiers had circulated for hours on social media.
It was a striking image. And it encapsulated the ruthless efficacy – and determination – with which Israel pursues its enemies.
What made this assassination more striking was its unusually prosaic nature – at least by Israeli standards. The soldiers who took Sinwar out were from the 828th Bislamach Brigade, a training unit that morphs into a fighting one during wartime. It was not special forces, but ordinary IDF soldiers who pursued Hamas’s chief butcher into a building and finished him off with a tank shell.
The Brigade hadn’t even been looking for him but were operating in the area as part of wider intelligence-driven operations to ‘close the net’ on the group’s senior leadership. They didn’t realise who he was until he was dead.
Footage from an IDF drone captured Sinwar’s last moments as it flew into the upper floor of a bombed building where he was trying to hide in an armchair, his face covered with a traditional Arab keffiyeh. It’s a mesmerising scene. The drone pauses; Sinwar sits motionless before hurling a wooden plank at it: a final show of defiance from a man who knows it is finally over.
However, this time it was not Israel’s creativity or technological brilliance but another reason it repeatedly prevails: mass mobilisation.
In Israel, almost everyone fights. And they never give up. Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant articulated this resolve when he quoted the Bible: ‘And ye shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword. – Leviticus 26. Our enemies cannot hide. We will pursue and eliminate them.’
For the Israelis, this settling of accounts is distinctly Old Testament. David Petraeus, former director of the CIA, told Radio 4 that Sinwar’s death was ‘bigger than [the killing of] Osama Bin Laden, who was massively symbolic but not that operational’.
Sinwar’s demise, was ‘both hugely symbolic, he was after all the complete leader of Hamas… but also hugely operational’.
As a former defence official, still close to Israel’s security establishment, told me: ‘October 7 was Sinwar’s day. He masterminded it. He planned it. He oversaw the execution. The rapes, the deaths, the hostages, the bloodshed and the regional conflict which has followed, are all on him.
‘He was the pure personification of evil. The region and the world are a much better place without him.’
It’s hard to disagree. Sinwar was a savage man. Born in 1962, in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, when the Strip was under Egyptian occupation, he majored in Arabic studies at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he was reportedly radicalised before getting involved with Hamas during its early days in the late 1980s.
He was one of the co-founders of al-Majd, Hamas’s internal security and intelligence arm, responsible for identifying collaborators with Israel and enforcing discipline within the organisation. It was a job that made him feared within Gaza, and in 1989 he was sentenced to four life sentences for orchestrating the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers as well as four Palestinians he deemed collaborators.
Sinwar had a reputation for being even more brutal towards Palestinians than Israelis and enjoyed torturing his victims.
Reports are that he boasted of forcing the brother of a suspected informer to bury his sibling alive, using a spade and then a spoon.
He served 22 years in jail, where he learned Hebrew and received life-saving treatment for brain cancer from Israeli doctors. As an Israeli said to me earlier this year with obvious fury: ‘How many Israelis died because we saved his miserable life?’
Sinwar was released in 2011 along with 1,026 other Palestinian prisoners in exchange for an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit.
His assassination crowns an extraordinary few weeks for Israel – and the Middle East.
At the beginning of the summer, things looked bleak for Jerusalem. The war was heading for a blood-sodden stalemate. The hostages were no closer to coming home. Hamas was reappearing in parts of Gaza that the IDF had supposedly cleared; and Israel was being castigated by everyone from Swedish eco-munchkin Greta Thunberg to the world’s secular pontiff, UN chief Antonio Guterres.
Then on July 31, the Israelis killed Hamas’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, in the heart of Tehran on the day of the new Iranian president’s inauguration: utter humiliation for Hamas’s Iranian patrons. For the first time in months, Israelis had something to cheer about.
Then, around six weeks later, explosions thundered around Beirut as the pagers of hundreds of Hezbollah terrorists simultaneously exploded. The following day, a load of their walkie-talkies blew up as well. Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, had managed to get into the supply chain of both devices; rumours are that Hezbollah even unwittingly paid Mossad – indirectly of course – for the pagers.
Hezbollah’s leadership was maimed and then, ten days later, effectively destroyed when the Israelis whacked the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah as he sat in his bunker almost certainly watching the speech Netanyahu was giving at the UN in New York. It’s likely that the Israeli leader’s face was the last thing he saw.
As I have previously observed in these pages, these past few months have been like watching an extended version of the baptism scene in The Godfather where Michael Corleone stands in church uttering his vows as godfather to his infant nephew while the scene repeatedly cuts to several of his men conducting a series of hits on all his enemies at once.
There has, of course, been a significant human cost to all this. Hamas’s claim of multiple tens of thousands of dead is an exaggeration; not least because so many of those it labels civilians will in fact be Hamas fighters.
Hamas hides everywhere it can in Gaza, and, after a year of war, much of the Strip lies in ruins. The Israelis, though, remain adamant they have taken many measures to avoid civilian casualties.
‘What is absolutely incredible,’ the former defence official told me, ‘is that despite Sinwar’s efforts and tactics to increase collateral damage and maximise civilian casualties on the Palestinian side with the most horrific and cynical human shield tactics, Israel has managed to keep the civilian-to-fighter death rate down to almost one-to-one. Most military historians and urban warfare experts rightly praise this as one of the most remarkable feats of modern warfare.’
Few believed the Israelis could achieve their objectives at all – but they did, and in the face of opposition not just from their legions of enemies but from their allies, too.
Western powers and US President Joe Biden repeatedly demanded that Israel ‘de-escalate’ or even negotiate a ceasefire, generally without calls for Hamas, which started this war, to surrender or release the hostages, which means that these are actually demands for Israel to surrender.
It was a gamble to ignore the US President. It was a bigger gamble to try to assassinate all the terrorist leaders fighting Israel, and it was an even bigger gamble still to open a second front in Lebanon. So far, all seem to have paid off.
Time and again the Israelis have prevailed when everyone has written them off. Time and again, it is their own ingenuity, courage and intelligence that have enabled it. Shortly after October 7, defence minister Gallant declared that ‘from (Hamas) gunmen in the field to those who are enjoying luxury jets while their emissaries are acting against women and children, they are destined to die’.
The Israelis have been as good as their word. The relentless hunting down of all those who take Jewish life in the past few months has reminded me of Israel’s Operation Wrath of God, one of the most extraordinary campaigns in modern history.
It was launched after the Palestinian terror group Black September massacred 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, then prime minister Golda Meir tasked Mossad with finding and killing those responsible.
It took years, but the Israelis took out almost all the perpetrators, across the world. The first target, Wael Zwaiter, killed in 1972, was the PLO’s representative in Rome. Mossad agents shot him 11 times, one bullet for each Israeli athlete killed.
That year, Mossad also assassinated senior PLO official Mahmoud Hamshari by planting a bomb in the phone at his Paris apartment, which detonated when he answered a call.
Ali Hassan Salameh, known as the ‘Red Prince’, was perhaps the architect of the Munich massacre – and he was hard to get. But Mossad is patient. Its agents eventually tracked him down in Beirut and killed him with a car bomb in 1979.
The Israelis know that the post-October 7 job is not yet complete. Lerner was blunt on Thursday: ‘With [Yahya] Sinwar’s assassination, Hamas’s head has been decapitated, its body is now in a state of advanced decay. But we will continue our efforts until 101 hostages are released,’ he told me.
To many on the Left in Western Europe, safe from military threat and content to luxuriate in the narcissism of endless protest, Israel is anathema.
But in eastern Europe, countries like Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltic states revere the Jewish state, recognising it as a small country surrounded by enemies that want to destroy it – just as they are surrounded by Russia.
Several of my Ukrainian friends were shocked by October 7. They simply couldn’t believe that the Israelis, whom they considered to be masters of security, could have been so badly caught out.
Arrogance and carelessness undid Israel that day, but the country has now spectacularly regained the initiative.
And not before time. Both Hamas and Hezbollah are constitutionally dedicated to Israel’s destruction. They must be destroyed for the conflict to end.
As former British soldier and Middle East expert Andrew Fox points out, there is a real concern over the hostages now. He says: ‘There’s a strong chance Hamas will strike back with more
execution videos as that’s really the only weapon they have left in their armoury that can hurt Israel.’
If the rumours are correct and their next leader is indeed Sinwar’s brother Mohammed, then Hamas is unlikely to undergo any profound ideological changes. But Sinwar minor will be taking charge of a group that the Israelis have torn apart.
As the former defence official told me: ‘The fact that Sinwar was not in a tunnel and with only a couple of other terrorists shows how desperately low they are on fighters. They seem to be in complete disarray.’
And then, of course, there is Iran, without which neither Hezbollah nor Hamas would be able to pose the egregious threat to Israel that they do. But Tehran’s clerics are seeing their proxies dismantled before their eyes.
What happens next remains unknown, though I am also assured that it will be something nobody expects. In the meantime, what is certain is that a world without Yahya Sinwar in it is a safer place, not just for Israelis but for everyone who abhors the extremism and terror he represented.
Wednesday was that rarest of things – a good day in the Middle East. May there be many more.