Sinwar was considered the architect of the rampage into southern Israel where Hamas fighters killed around 1,200 people and took some 250 hostages in the state of Israel’s deadliest ever day.
Israel immediately retaliated with air strikes and ground offensives, which have since killed more than 42,000 people, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. Much of the Strip is destroyed.
Huge numbers have been forced from their homes and the United Nations estimates that roughly a quarter of all structures in Gaza have been either destroyed or severely damaged.
Muhammad, an unemployed 26-year-old, said he too had been furious with Sinwar.
He said: “I was in a state of great anger at Sinwar, because of this war.
“I had to stop my work that I had only started one month before the war.
“I was sitting with my friends and expressing our anger.
“We used to say if the killing of Sinwar would stop the war, then kill him in order to stop this killing and destruction.
“But when pictures of his death spread, I felt very embarrassed about myself, that he did not ignite the war and hide, but was in the battlefield and did not leave it.
“This is shameful for us to misunderstand it in this way, I hope that he will forgive us.”
‘Like a lightning bolt’
Dina, who has been forced to leave her home in northern Gaza and move south to the Mawasi area in Khan Younis, has lost friends, cousins and grandchildren in the war.
The news of Sinwar’s death hit her “like a lightning bolt” she said.
“We wondered, is this really true? Or is it just another story from the Israeli occupation? And then the question: what will happen to us after all of this?”
She went on: “If you’d asked me before Sinwar was killed, I might have said he wasn’t a hero, and that the real heroes were us, the people.”
But her perspective changed with his death. “When you see him standing firm, fighting, and not among the people hiding in tents, you start to see things differently.”
She has doubts that Sinwar’s death will end the war.
“If Israel’s problem was only with Sinwar, maybe his death would help stop the war. But Israel’s problem isn’t with Sinwar,” she says. “Their problem is with every Palestinian who breathes and every Arab who speaks.”
But she is desperate for an end to the bloodshed and devastation.
“Everything has an end, and the war will end too,” she says with a sense of exhaustion. “The only wish I have is for the war to stop. We need a chance to stop living in fear, to grieve for the ones we’ve lost.”