Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who masterminded the 7 October attack on Israel that triggered the war in Gaza, may have been killed, according to the Israeli military.
A statement released on Thursday afternoon said: “During Israel Defense Forces (IDF) operations in the Gaza Strip, three terrorists were eliminated. The IDF [is] checking the possibility that one of the terrorists was Yahya Sinwar. At this stage, the identity of the terrorists cannot be confirmed.”
“In the building where the terrorists were eliminated, there were no signs of the presence of hostages in the area. The forces that are operating in the area are continuing to operate with the required caution.”
Several security officials, speaking anonymously, told Israeli media that the bodies had been taken to Israel for DNA tests, and that the IDF assesses “with high probability” that one of those killed was Sinwar.
Israel’s Kan Radio reported that the Hamas leader was killed “by chance”, and not as a result of intelligence gathering. The station also said the bodies were found with lots of cash and fake IDs.
It has long been believed that Sinwar had surrounded himself with Israeli hostages to lessen the likelihood of being killed. However, in a statement, the prime minister’s office said that no hostages were believed to have been present.
Sinwar considers himself an expert on Israel’s military and politics. He speaks perfect Hebrew, learned during more than 20 years in prison, and is widely believed to have been the driving force behind Hamas’s strategy of the last few years: to lull Israel into thinking the group had been deterred from fighting Israel, before launching the surprise attack in which 1,200 people were killed and another 250 taken hostage.
Various western and Israeli intelligence assessments over the past year suggested that Sinwar has long shunned electronic communication, relying on a network of couriers to communicate with the outside world from Hamas’s vast network of tunnels beneath the Gaza Strip.
Those reports also said Sinwar had become “fatalistic” over a year of intense warfare in which 42,000 people have been killed, believing he would die, but still hoping to ensnare Israel in a regional battle with Iran and allied groups around the Middle East such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
Sinwar, 61, was born in the Khan Younis refugee camp in southern Gaza. Among his childhood friends were Mohammed Deif, Hamas’s military chief, whom Israel claimed to have killed in an airstrike three months ago, and Mohammed Dahlan, an influential member of the secular Fatah party now living in exile in the UAE.
He joined Hamas at an early age, spending much of his youth in and out of Israeli prison. He rose through the ranks as an infamous enforcer, in charge of finding and killing suspected Palestinian collaborators with Israel.
In 1989, he was sentenced to four life sentences for the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians he suspected of collaboration. He served 22 years before being released in the 2011 prisoner exchange in which Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was returned for 1,000 Palestinians.
He was elected by other Hamas members in a secret ballot as Hamas’s chief in Gaza in 2017, surviving several Israeli assassination attempts.
In a sign of the group’s hardening position on ceasefire talks, Sinwar was appointed as head of the group overall after Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s Qatar-based political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, in July.