One of the main objectives of the Israeli offensive has been achieved. Israel announced Thursday, October 17, that Hamas leader Yahya Sinouar had been killed during an operation in Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip, without official confirmation from the Islamist movement so far. In a video message broadcast overnight, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assured that this death marked “the beginning of the end” of the war in Gaza.
Presented by Israel as the architect of the October 7, 2023 attack on its soil, this 61-year-old radical activist has led the Palestinian Islamist movement in the Gaza Strip since 2017, before being named political leader of Hamas in early August after the death of Ismaïl Haniyeh at the end of July.
The Israeli army and domestic intelligence services “confirm that after a year-long hunt,” soldiers “eliminated Yahya Sinouar” on Wednesday, the IDF said. If Israel’s military actions pushed the Hamas leader to his limits, the operation which cost him his life nevertheless took place somewhat by chance.
Hamas leader pursued in destroyed building
In the evening, army spokesperson and Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari clarified the conditions of this elimination. According to him, Yahya Sinouar was spotted on Wednesday by soldiers in the company of two other fighters in the Tel Sultan district of Rafah, in the far south of the territory. A location corroborated Thursday evening by the Saudi television channel Al-Arabiya.
The soldiers then reportedly shot at the group, forcing them to disperse. “Sinouar rushed alone into a building and our forces inspected the area with a drone,” Daniel Hagari explained in a televised statement, showing a video filmed by the drone.
In this video, relayed on the social networkan injured man presented as the leader of Hamas sits in a gutted living room chair on the first floor of a partially destroyed building, his face hidden by a cloth that could be a keffiyeh. He has an object resembling a sword in his hand, which he finally throws at the drone. According to the army, these images are those of Yahya Sinouar “a few moments with his elimination”.
“We shot at this building before entering,” said Daniel Hagari. After the shots, Israeli soldiers “found the area littered with explosives and approached the bodies cautiously,” tells the American daily New York Times. According to the spokesperson for the Israeli army, the body of Yahya Sinouar was then found “with a pistol and 40,000 shekels [environ 10 000 euros]”In all, three fighters were killed in this operation, according to Israeli forces.
A chance encounter by infantry soldiers
Once the body was identified by DNA on Thursday, the assassination of Sinouar was celebrated as a victory by Israel, after more than a year of intensive tracking of the Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip: the man with white hair and with thick black eyebrows had not appeared in public since October 2023. “The army and the Shabak [renseignement intérieur, NDLR] operated for months to provide intelligence in order to eliminate Yahya Sinouar,” said Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari.
However, the meeting of Israeli soldiers with the Hamas leader in the Tel Sultan neighborhood of Rafah was believed to be due to a stroke of luck. Although Israeli forces were operating “in recent weeks” in this area following information indicating the likely presence of senior Hamas officials, according to the Israeli military, the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz affirmed Thursday that the troops engaged in Wednesday’s operation did not have information on the presence of Yahya Sinouar in the area.
British news agency Reuters thus specifies that “unlike other militant leaders hunted down and killed by Israel, […] The operation that ultimately killed Sinwar was not a planned, targeted strike, or an operation carried out by elite commandos.” The Hamas leader was reportedly “found by infantry soldiers from the Bislach brigade, a unit which normally trains future unit commanders”, reports this media.
The result of a year of war of attrition in Gaza
However, this chance encounter is the result of hard work by the Israeli army. As summarized by Reuters, the Israeli army and intelligence services “progressively restricted the area in which it could operate” through their military actions, at the cost of tens of thousands of Palestinian lives. Over the past year, at least 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli offensive in Gaza, according to data from the Hamas government’s Health Ministry, deemed reliable by the UN.
In the last months of his life, Yahya Sinouar “appeared to have stopped using telephones and other communication equipment which would have allowed Israel’s powerful intelligence services to track him”, adds the British agency. “Many believed that he was hiding underground in Gaza and that he had surrounded himself with hostages taken from Israel,” explains the New York Times.
According to Israel, Sinouar’s DNA had notably been found “in a tunnel a few hundred meters from where the bodies of six Israeli hostages were found six weeks ago”, reports the American newspaper. He was finally killed on the surface on Wednesday, with “no sign of the presence of hostages” nearby, the Israeli army said on Thursday.