Will the death of Yahya Sinwar lead to a ceasefire?
In what appears to be a “chance” victory, Israel has killed its ultimate target: Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas.
Israeli foreign minister, Israel Katz, confirmed on Thursday 17 October that one of its ground operations in the city of Rafah had killed three militants, one of whom turned out to be Sinwar. Israel’s Kan Radio reported that the killing of Sinwar was “by chance” and that the IDF had no special intelligence indicating he was in the area. In a statement earlier in the day, the military said that in “the building where the terrorists were eliminated, there were no signs of the presence of hostages in the area. The forces that are operating in the area are continuing to operate with the required caution.”
This is a major victory for Benjamin Netanyahu. It was Sinwar, until recently the head of Hamas’s military wing inside of Gaza, who planned and orchestrated the 7 October attacks, which killed 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals, many of them civilians.
Born in Gaza in 1962, Sinwar was recruited to Hamas by the group’s founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, in the 1980s. He became the chief of Hamas’s internal security unit, known as Majd. Israel incarcerated him in 1988 on charges of killing two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians he suspected of collaborating with Israel. He spent more than 20 years in prison, where he learned to speak Hebrew and devoured Israeli media and autobiographies by former Israeli security officials. (“Prison builds you,” he once told an Italian journalist.)
Sinwar was released in 2011 as part of a prisoner exchange whereby Israel released more than 1000 Palestinians in exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held captive for over five years in Gaza by Hamas. He later indicated this experience demonstrated to him the effectiveness of holding an Israeli soldier hostage. Upon his release, Sinwar married, had children and climbed the ranks of Hamas within Gaza – a process that ultimately led to him becoming the political head of Hamas in August following the assassination of his predecessor Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.
What, exactly, will Sinwar’s death mean for the war? It was Sinwar, rather than Haniyeh, who had long been vehemently opposed to a ceasefire deal with Israel. His death not only removes his opposition as an obstacle, it also provides Netanyahu with a significant victory, which could in theory provide a credible “off ramp” to end the fighting.
And yet, it might not change anything at all. Peter Ricketts, a former diplomat and national security adviser, told me that “Netanyahu has no interest in halting the fighting in Gaza now. His forces have momentum, the US have in effect given up pressing him for a ceasefire, concentrating their political energy on getting humanitarian aid in the north given the desperate needs there. He will, in my view, keep going until the outcome of the US election is clear and take stock then. But the right-wingers in his Cabinet are demanding that he hang on to Israeli military control of Gaza in the longer term and even to restart settlement there. It may be that Netanyahu doesn’t need a ceasefire anymore, he feels he can ‘win’ without one.”
With the death of Sinwar, exactly what such a “win” would now look like, is increasingly difficult to imagine.