Israel Kills Hamas Leader Yahya Sinwar

Israel is reporting that it’s “highly likely” they killed Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar in a skirmish. Details are still scant, as I began writing this the moment Israel reported they confirmed that the man they killed was the Hamas leader, but Nadav Eyal, columnist for Yedioth Ahronoth, summarized what we seemingly know as of right now on Twitter:

A reserve IDF force operating near Rafah spotted three armed men in a building, which was then hit by a drone/tank shell. A man resembling Sinwar and a Hamas regiment commander were found dead with a substantial amount of cash and weapons. This was part of the ongoing IDF operation, not a targeted assassination. No hostages are believed to have been present, but the ground is being inspected to confirm.

Dimi Reider, co-founder of +972 Magazine, also reported additional details about how this unfolded:

The soldiers who killed Sinwar were cadets. Last night, during a “routine” op they took gunfire from a building and returned fire with shoulder-fired missiles, destroying the building. They searched the building at daylight and found Sinwar’s body. Very weird.

(If this is true, either Sinwar decided to go out fighting – for some reason – or one of his bodyguards fucked up, panicked, and opened fire at soldiers who otherwise wouldn’t even have spotted the group.)

It’s notable that Sinwar was reportedly above ground when Israel killed him. Much of the story we have been sold over the last year is how Sinwar is supposedly deep underground, safe from Israeli depravity while Gaza bears the brunt of his decision. Whether he was momentarily leaving a bunker or whether that notion was bunk is still anyone’s guess, and we are now faced with the prospect of citing a country doing a genocide as the chief source of news in this development. Israel is telling countries they have DNA proof that the man they killed is Sinwar, so for now, there is no reason to disbelieve this assertion given the evidence they claim to have.

While Israel has showed the world over the last year that there are no limits to their barbarity in their genocide of Gaza, this shock and awe campaign to exterminate an entire group of people has overshadowed Sinwar’s responsibility in Gaza’s immiseration. Some theorize that he knew exactly what he was unleashing when he staged the October 7th terrorist attack, while others portray him as an idealistic operator who believed that he would be able to exchange hostages in the wake of 10/7.

Whatever his intent, Sinwar murdered hundreds of Israeli civilians in order to damn the Palestinians to a life of living hell. That’s the headline of his legacy. The Israeli Defense Forces have long demonstrated their depravity and their contempt for international law, and if Sinwar did not think that they would unleash the full force of their violent nature after 10/7, then he was too incompetent to lead. He deserves no benefit of the doubt, as his naivete could lead to the elimination of an entire people. Sinwar made a grave strategic miscalculation, and millions of other people have been paying for his mistake, until today.

You can never excuse 10/7, because if we accept civilian casualties as normal then we have rolled back pretty much all societal progress and reverted back to our nomadic us versus them animalistic instincts, but you can explain the logic behind why it occurred. October 7th does not happen without the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and if Yahya Sinwar was never born, something like it would have inevitably unfolded so long as Israel continued to be a colonialist apartheid state immiserating Gaza. The Palestinians spent decades appealing to global diplomatic structures, trying the routes the United States claims are hallowed ground for international law, and after appealing to the so-called civilized world, diplomacy failed them and Sinwar’s militaristic attitude prevailed. Sinwar earned the legacy of the consequences of his own decisions, but so too do Israel and the United States, who helped embolden and empower Hamas’s militant leader by closing off every single diplomatic avenue for Palestinians to achieve self-determination.

Now that Israel has killed the leaders of both Hamas and Hezbollah, one might believe they may be more likely to agree to a ceasefire, but that would naively assume this assault on the region was about killing Sinwar or Hassan Nasrallah in the first place. With Sinwar’s death, Israel now has an opportunity to prove that their policy of widespread barbarity has some kind of goal behind it other than massacring as many people as they possibly can. I’m not holding my breath that they will take it.