The Israeli military has released drone footage it says shows Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s final moments: alone in a ruined Gaza apartment with the walls blown out from shelling, sat hunched in a chair covered by dust, with his head and face obscured by a scarf.
With his right arm appearing severely wounded, the video shows Sinwar flinging a stick over his head in the direction of the approaching drone. The Guardian has not independently verified the footage.
When the footage was taken, Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari said Sinwar was only identified as a fighter. The military then fired an additional shell at the building, causing it to collapse and kill him, Hagari said. He said Sinwar was found with a bulletproof vest, grenades, and 40,000 shekels ($10,707).
According to the Jerusalem Post, Hagari told reporters: “Sinwar fled alone into one of the buildings. Our forces used a drone to scan the area, which you can see here in the footage I’m presenting.”
“Sinwar, who was injured in his hand by gunfire, can be seen here with his face covered, in his final moments, throwing a wooden plank at the drone,” he said.
“He tried to escape and our forces eliminated him.”.
Hamas has not commented on the killing of Sinwar.
Photos circulating online showed the body of a man resembling Sinwar with a gaping head wound, dressed in a military-style vest, half buried in the rubble of a destroyed building.
Israeli officials said Sinwar was found by infantry soldiers searching an area in the Tal El Sultan area of southern Gaza on Wednesday, where they believed senior members of Hamas were located.
The troops saw three suspected militants moving between buildings and opened fire, leading to a gunfight during which Sinwar escaped into a ruined building.
In the last months of his life, Sinwar, the main architect of the 7 October 2023 attack on Israel that set off the war in Gaza, appears to have stopped using telephones and other communication equipment that would have allowed Israel’s powerful intelligence services to track him down.
Israeli officials said they believed he was hiding in one of the vast network of tunnels that Hamas dug beneath Gaza over the past two decades, but as more and more have been uncovered by Israeli troops, even the tunnels were no guarantee of escaping capture.
Intelligence services had been searching for Sinwar for months and had been gradually restricting the area where he could operate, the military said. Dental records, fingerprints and DNA testing provided final confirmation of Sinwar’s death.