“Yahya Sinwar’s killing: Why it’s Israel’s biggest victory over Hamas – BBC analysis Hamas in Gaza, writes the BBC’s security correspondent Frank Gardner. NV publishes material as part of an information partnership. His death became serious”, — write on: ua.news
Yahya Sinwar’s assassination: why it’s Israel’s biggest victory over Hamas – BBC analysis Sinwar is considered the main architect of the terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023 (Photo: EPA)
The killing of Yahya Sinwar was Israel’s biggest victory in the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, writes the BBC’s security correspondent Frank Gardner. NV publishes material as part of an information partnership.
His death was a major blow to the organization he had turned into a fighting force that inflicted the greatest defeat on the State of Israel in its history.
Sinwar was killed not during a planned special forces operation, but as a result of an accidental clash with Israeli forces in Rafah in southern Gaza.
In a photo taken at the scene, Sinwar is lying dead in his uniform among the ruins of a building hit by an Israeli tank.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the soldiers, but made it clear that no matter how great the victory, it was not the end of the war.
Netanyahu has repeatedly reiterated the main goals of the war — the destruction of Hamas as a military and political force and the return of Israeli hostages.
Neither has been achieved, despite more than a year of war that has left at least 42,000 Palestinians dead and much of Gaza in ruins, notes BBC international editor and Middle East specialist Jeremy Bowen.
The hostages held by the militants have still not been released, and Hamas continues to fight and sometimes kill Israeli soldiers.
Death of Sinwar
This is an abridged translation of an article by BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner published on the BBC News website
Sinwar is believed to be the main architect of the October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks and was the most wanted man in the country.
He disappeared at the start of the war, which was sparked by unprecedented attacks by Hamas, during which the militants killed about 1,200 people and took another 251 hostage.
“Yahya Sinwar is the commander … and he is dead,” said a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari.
Sinwar was believed to have spent most of the past year underground, hiding in tunnels somewhere under Gaza with his bodyguards, speaking to almost no one, for fear of being tracked down and found. There were also fears that he would surround himself with Israeli hostages as a human shield.
But soldiers operating in southern Gaza eventually killed Sinwar inside a building where there were no signs of hostages, according to the IDF. The Israeli military announced the death of the Hamas leader on Thursday after his body was identified using fingerprints and dental records.
““The one who committed the worst massacre in the history of our people since the Holocaust, the arch-terrorist who killed thousands of Israelis and kidnapped hundreds of our citizens, was killed today by our heroic soldiers,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“And today, as we promised, we settled accounts with him.”
Israel has already killed many other high-ranking Hamas figures in Gaza, all of whom were announced after the October 7 attacks “the dead.”
Among them is Mohammed Deif, the leader of the military wing of Hamas, who the IDF said was killed in an airstrike in Gaza in July.
It was believed that the idea behind the October 7 attack belonged to Deif, and that Sinwar led the group that planned the attacks.
Hamas also blamed Israel for the assassination of its top leader, Ismail Ghaniyya, in Tehran in July. Despite the fact that Sinwara was on the run, he was appointed as the successor.
Education and arrests
Sinwar, 61, known as Abu Ibrahim, was born in the Khan Yunis refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip. His parents were from Ashkelon but became refugees after what Palestinians call an event “nakba” (catastrophe) — the mass eviction of Palestinians from their native homes during the war that began after the establishment of Israel in 1948.
He was educated at Khan Yunis High School for Boys and later obtained a BA in Arabic from the Islamic University of Gaza.
Khan Yunis was at that time “a bastion” of support for the Muslim Brotherhood, said Ehud Yaari, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who interviewed Sinwar four times in prison.
Islamist group “became a grassroots movement for young people who went to mosques in a poor refugee camp,” Yaari said, and it later took on the same meaning for Hamas.
Israel first arrested 19-year-old Sinwar in 1982 for “Islamic activities” and was jailed again in 1985. Around this time, he won the trust of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
They “have become very, very close,” said Kobi Michael, a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. This relationship with the spiritual leader of the organization would later add to Sinwar “the nimbus effect” inside the movement, the researcher added.
Two years after Hamas was founded in 1987, Sinwar created the group’s dreaded internal security organization, Al-Majd. He was still only 25.
Al-Majd became infamous for brutally punishing those accused of so-called immorality. According to Michael, Sinwar attacked stores that kept “sex videos,” and tracked down and killed anyone suspected of collaborating with Israel.
“He killed some of them with his own hands and was proud of it, telling me and others about it,” Yaari said.
He later admitted to punishing the suspected informant by forcing the man’s brother to bury him alive, burying him with a spoon instead of a shovel, Israeli officials said.
Yaari said that he is “the kind of person who can gather around him followers, admirers — along with those who are just afraid of him and don’t want to fight with him.”
In 1988, Sinwar allegedly planned the kidnapping and murder of two Israeli soldiers. In the same year, Israel arrested him and convicted him for the murder of 12 Palestinians. Sinwar received four life sentences.
In Israeli prisons
Sinwar spent much of his adult life — more than 22 years — in Israeli prisons, from 1988 to 2011. Being there, partly in solitary confinement, seems to have radicalized him even more.
Assessing Sinwar’s personality, Yaari says that he was a psychopath. “But to say he’s a psychopath, period, would be a mistake,” Yaari adds, “because then you’d miss this strange, complex figure.”
According to Yaari, Sinwar was “extremely cunning, clever – a guy who knows how to turn personal charm on and off.”
When Sinwar told him that Israel must be destroyed and insisted that there was no place for Jews in Palestine, “he joked, ‘maybe we’ll make an exception for you.’
During his imprisonment, Sinwar learned Hebrew by reading Israeli newspapers. Yaari said that Sinwar always preferred to speak with him in Hebrew, even though Yaari was fluent in Arabic.
Sinwar was released in 2011 in the exchange of 1,027 Palestinian and Israeli Arab prisoners for one Israeli hostage, IDF soldier Gilad Shalit.
By then, Israel had ended its occupation of Gaza, and Hamas had won the election before eliminating its rivals, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah party, by tossing many of its members off the roofs of high-rise buildings.
Return to Gaza
When Sinwar returned to Gaza, he was immediately accepted as a leader, due to his prestige as a founding member of Hamas who had spent so many years of his life in Israeli prisons.
“But people were also just afraid of him — he killed people with his own hands, Michael said. “He was very quick, aggressive and charismatic at the same time.”
For his brutality and propensity for violence, Sinwar was nicknamed the Slaughterer of Khan Yunis.
In 2013, Sinwar was elected a member of the Hamas Politburo in the Gaza Strip, and in 2017 he headed the organization.
In 2018, he claimed that Palestinians loyal to the rival Palestinian Authority tried to kill him (PA) on the West Bank.
Many in the Israeli defense ministry believe that releasing Sinwar from prison during the exchange was a fatal mistake.
Yaari said that Sinwar considered himself “the guy destined to liberate Palestine’ and that he ‘had no intention of improving the economic situation and social services in Gaza’.
In 2015, the US State Department officially designated Sinwar as an international terrorist.
In May 2021, Israeli aircraft struck his home and office in the Gaza Strip. In a televised address in April 2022, he urged people to attack Israel by any means available.
Analysts believed he was a key figure linking Hamas’ political bureau to its armed wing, the Izzeddine al-Qassam Brigades, which masterminded the October 7 attacks.
The loss of Yahya Sinwar will be a seismic blow to Hamas.
The organization will now have to decide whether the time has come to strike a deal that will end Israel’s year-long military operation that has devastated the Gaza Strip.
Or, conversely, whether to continue fighting and resisting despite the terrible toll this conflict has taken on Palestinian civilians.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken recently said that a ceasefire agreement in Gaza was “90%” reached. Killing Sinwar could be an opportunity to finally end this deal and bring the Israeli hostages home.
It could also have the opposite effect of driving angry Hamas members further than ever from any compromise.