Israel Confirms Elimination of Hamas Leader, Yahya Sinwar, in Gaza

Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja

Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, one of the masterminds of the October 7 massacre in Israel, has been killed, according to the Israeli military, quoted by CNN yesterday.

“This is the beginning of the day after Hamas,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, while calling on those holding Israelis captive in Gaza to lay down their weapons and return the hostages, pledging whoever does so will be allowed to “go out and live.”

An Israeli drone flying over Gaza yesterday spotted Sinwar’s body in the rubble of a building that was struck by an Israeli tank Wednesday, a source told CNN.

 When soldiers went in on foot to get a closer look, they started to suspect it was the Hamas leader, and Israeli officials ran DNA tests and used dental records to confirm his identity, the report said.

Sinwar was killed in one of the only houses still standing in a residential area of Rafah, a CNN analysis of videos and photos released by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) found.

Yesterday, IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari confirmed Sinwar was killed in the Tal al-Sultan area of Rafah.

It’s unclear whether Sinwar was sheltering in the area for some time or had only recently sheltered there.  But the area was largely untouched by the war until August 28, when a group of homes was destroyed just north of where Sinwar was killed, according to CNN’s review of the Planet Labs satellite imagery.

By September 2, the home where Sinwar was found was surrounded by destruction.

While US special operations forces in Israel have been primarily focused on hostage recovery efforts, officials told CNN on Thursday that those efforts often overlapped with helping find Hamas leadership, due to their practice of keeping hostages around the group’s leaders.

“The purpose is to find the hostages, but to do that you basically have to find the (high-value individuals),” one US defense official said. “It’s hard to say they’re separate because the activity is almost one in the same.”

US officials have said since last year that special operations forces were in Israel to assist with hostage recovery, but President Joe Biden yesterday said he directed them to go to Israel after Hamas’ October 7 attacks “to help locate and track” Sinwar and other Hamas leaders.

US officials believed for months that Sinwar was underground and possibly surrounded by hostages he was using as shields. An Israeli military spokesperson said that Sinwar was killed in an area close to where the bodies of six hostages were recovered last month.

The Israeli military believes Sinwar was trying to escape the Rafah area in southern Gaza and head north at the time he was killed.

To think through what happens next, perhaps the most crucial piece of information is the fate of his brother Mohammed. Last month a very senior Israeli official told CNN that Mohammad Sinwar had taken over as Hamas’s military commander after the killing of its pre-war chief Mohammed Deif in an Israeli air strike on July 13.

Yahya and Mohammed were always very close and rose through Hamas’s ranks together; the same senior official told CNN that as recently as late August they were often still together.

“ Could they have died together on Wednesday? If Mohammed survived this week, he will likely continue his brother’s hardline negotiating tactics as Israel seeks to extract its remaining hostages from the Palestinian enclave.

“Until a clear picture emerges, it will be hard to know the terror group’s next move in the deadlocked negotiations for a hostage release and ceasefire deal,” the report said.

Recall that on  July 31, 2024, Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, was assassinated along with his personal bodyguard in the Iranian capital, Tehran, by an apparent Israeli attack.