Yahya Sinwar is dead. On Thursday, Israel confirmed it had killed the 62-year-old leader of Hamas in a strike in southern Gaza. Sinwar’s death is significant — for both the U.S.-designated terrorist group that he led and the Jewish state that he sought to destroy.
Sinwar had been described as the “architect” of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, in which Hamas-led terrorists invaded Israel. There, they raped, tortured, and murdered more than 1,200 people while taking hundreds more hostage. The attack by Hamas and other Iranian proxies prompted a war that endures to this day. The Hamas leader has spent much of the past year reportedly hiding in tunnels and using hostages as human shields.
Although Israelis and Palestinians have both suffered from Sinwar’s war, the terrorist himself directly profited from the conflict. Sinwar had been Hamas’s commander in the Gaza Strip but was promoted to lead the group after Israel killed Ismail Haniyeh in a daring strike in Iran in July 2024. Sinwar rose in prominence within Hamas after he plotted the abduction and murder of Israeli soldiers in the late 1980s. He was particularly infamous for his role in killing Palestinian “collaborators” — that is, those Palestinians who objected to Hamas’s brutal, authoritarian rule. Sinwar was later caught and jailed in an Israeli prison for his crimes. He even received life-saving treatment for brain cancer while he was incarcerated. Tragically, the nephew of Yuval Bitton, the Israeli doctor who saved Sinwar, would be among those murdered by Hamas on Oct. 7.
In 2011, Sinwar was released along with more than 1,000 terrorists as part of a hostage “deal” for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, whom the terrorist organization kidnapped in 2006. Sinwar spent the last decade-plus cementing his rise, strengthening relations with Iran, and plotting terrorism.
Sinwar’s death is significant, both symbolically and otherwise. Israel has killed the “architect” of the worst slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. His demise is also the tip of the iceberg. In a span of months, Israel has eliminated the head of Hamas, Haniyeh, as well as top Hezbollah operatives, including the longtime leader of that Lebanese-based group, Hassan Nasrallah. And now Haniyeh’s successor is dead, too. Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran’s two most formidable proxies, are severely degraded. The overwhelming majority of Hamas’s “battalions” have been destroyed — and many of them, it must be noted, in Rafah, where Sinwar was killed and where the Biden administration attempted to pressure Israel not to launch operations.
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Israelis, Americans, and Palestinians, among others, should rejoice at Sinwar’s death. The terrorist’s rise was predicated on “internal security,” murdering his own people, and his name will forever be linked to Oct. 7.
Israel’s success in its war against Hamas will depend more on postwar planning and Jerusalem’s ability to prevent the group’s resurgence. And that will prove easier said than done.
The writer is a Senior Research Analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
