The Israeli soldiers who came across Yahya Sinwar and his two bodyguards were trainee squad commanders from an infantry school unit.
The fact it was a platoon from the infantry commanders and combat training school (Bislamach) that found the Hamas commander and mastermind of the 7 October attacks is all the more ironic in light of the year-long fruitless manhunt conducted by the cream of Israel’s special forces and intelligence units.
Sinwar’s discovery in the Tel al-Sultan refugee camp in Rafah on Wednesday may not have been an entirely random twist of fate, however. After his death was confirmed, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) revealed that traces of his DNA had been found in the same area in early September, in an underground passageway a few hundred metres from the tunnel where the bodies of six executed Israeli hostages were found.
The Israeli theory now is that the hostages had been Sinwar’s shields at some point and that when IDF patrols got too close, he decided their presence was making him too conspicuous, so he left that hiding place and had the hostages shot and dumped some way away.
Ben Caspit, a veteran journalist on the Ma’ariv newspaper, credits the head of the IDF’s southern command, Maj Gen Yaron Finkelman, a man haunted by Israel’s catastrophic security failure on 7 October last year, with following his hunch that Sinwar would not have been able to travel far after the hostages were killed and maintaining an intensive focus on Tel al-Sultan.
When the trainees for the Bislamach Brigade spotted the three armed men in the ruins of the Rafah camp on Wednesday, a gunfight erupted, in which at least one of the Palestinians was wounded. The Hamas fighters split and fled, two of them into one building, the third, apparently badly wounded, went into another.
The IDF patrol directed tank fire at the two buildings, but when they entered the wrecked structure where the single wounded man had taken refuge, it was clear he was still alive. He threw two grenades from the second floor, one of which exploded and one did not, according to Israeli press reports.
The soldiers withdrew and sent a drone through the gaping hole in the side of the building to investigate the wrecked interior. The footage from its camera, released by the IDF on Thursday night, recorded Sinwar’s last moments.
He was sitting in one of three armchairs, his back to the drone with a bloody stump balanced on the armrest where his right hand should have been. Hearing the buzz of the little aircraft, he turned his head towards it, his face covered in a scarf, and as it drew near, he threw a stick at it with his left hand, a final act of defiance forcing the drone to withdraw.
According to the IDF’s account, the Bislamach trainees then directed another tank round into the building’s second floor and sent in the drone again to make sure he was dead.
It was only then that the soldiers got a clear look at his face, which looked familiar despite horrendous wounds on its left side. The gruesome picture that went around the world on social media on Thursday shows his distinctive grey stubble. He lies encased in rubble with his eyes closed and his mouth open.
The corpse was found with a gun and a number of identity documents on it, along with 40,000 Israeli shekels (about £8,300) in cash, further evidence that the dead man was a significant person.
The soldiers took a bit of finger from the remains and sent it for comparison with the DNA that the Israelis had extracted during Sinwar’s detention of more than two decades, allowing the IDF to confirm the identity of the body late on Thursday night.
After the area was checked for explosives, Sinwar’s body was removed in a black body bag, and a quick autopsy recorded he had a bullet wound to the head, raising questions over whether it was tank fire or a shot from an Israeli rifle that ended his life.
The fallout of Sinwar’s killing is uncertain. It is not clear whether Hamas will capitulate or fight even harder, but there is little doubt that the last images of the Hamas leader, dressed in combat gear after fighting to the last breath, will only heighten his martyr status for some. Unsurprisingly, the whereabouts of his body are now an Israeli state secret.