He had been on Israel’s most wanted list for years. More than any other Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar was the mastermind of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October last year. It was the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, a horrific and spectacular operation that left 1,200 dead and 250 taken hostage. It blindsided Israel’s much-vaunted intelligence services and armed forces, leaving them shocked and humiliated, as it did prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had artfully and diligently presented himself as Israel’s “Mr Security”. Netanyahu has now delivered the vengeance of Sinwar’s death. But this act alone is unlikely to change the post-7 October landscape – either the diplomatic deadlock or the blasted skyline of Gaza itself.
If 7 October was Netanyahu’s humiliation, it was Sinwar’s triumph. His death will be celebrated by Israel’s leaders as well as its people – and rightly so. Sinwar spent more than 20 years imprisoned in Israel, during which time he learned Hebrew, rooted out informants, survived brain cancer, and established himself as the undisputed leader of other Hamas prisoners. Only with great reluctance did the Israelis agree to make him part of a 2011 prisoner exchange to secure the release of Gilad Shalit, a young IDF soldier Hamas had abducted in 2006.
Unchastised, Sinwar rejoined Hamas, plunged back into the fight, and before long entered its inner circle. He was a hard man: humourless, pitiless, consumed by the determination to extirpate what he regarded as a mainly British-enabled mass influx of European Jews that displaced Palestinians from their land – the fate suffered by Sinwar’s parents, who ended up as refugees in Gaza after they were forced to flee the village of Al-Majdal, now part of the Israeli city of Ashkelon on the Mediterranean coast. Save for occasional gestures of compromise – for example his willingness to accept provisionally the Palestinian Authority (PA)’s quest for a two-state solution through negotiations with Israel – he maintained that Hamas would never accept Israel’s legitimacy or abandon its goal of reclaiming the Palestinians’ historic homeland.
Hamas narrowly won the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections and evicted the PA from Gaza the following year. Israel then effectively blockaded Gaza indefinitely, inflicting untold hardships on its denizens. But to Sinwar, any hardship was a price worth paying in the fight for liberation. And the same for the victims of Israel’s retaliation: for the 42,000 Gazans killed, for the displaced and the homeless, and for the others now stalked by chronic hunger and diseases, wandering between unprotected safe zones. This, too, Sinwar saw as a necessary, even glorious, sacrifice.
Using the labyrinthine network of underground tunnels built by Hamas, he had been able to elude what was arguably Israel’s most intensive manhunt ever. And he managed to maintain contact with the members of Hamas’s political wing in Qatar who were engaged in negotiations with Israel over a ceasefire – one that Israelis hoped would bring the remaining hostages, including the dead, back home. But despite the extensive firepower the IDF directed at Gaza, Sinwar would not relent, demanding that if Israel wanted to end the fighting it would have to agree to a permanent ceasefire and total withdrawal from Gaza. Netanyahu, obdurate for his own reasons, had insisted on other conditions, which included a permanent Israeli presence along the Philadelphi corridor, a roadway adjacent to the Gaza-Egyptian border, as well as the Netzarim corridor, which bisects Gaza.
There was no sign that the resulting deadlock was even close to being broken, which meant that the war in Gaza would continue without end, delaying indefinitely the return of the hostages. The killing of Sinwar might therefore be seen as a breakthrough, a chance for the “day after in Gaza” to begin, as the US president Joe Biden put it. But Netanyahu insists the war is “not over”. The opposition leader Benny Gantz similarly said Israel must continue to operate in Gaza “for years to come”. Sinwar’s death seems more of a staging post than a turning point.
Hamas is simultaneously a political party, a government and a terrorist movement wedded to the liberation of historic Palestine and the destruction of Israel. It is not a cult held together by one irreplaceable, charismatic leader. Sinwar’s death will therefore not precipitate Hamas’s unravelling; nor will it necessarily even put a ceasefire deal within reach. Sinwar likely knew, once the war began on 8 October, that he was a marked man and would end up a shahid (martyr); he may have relished the prospect of being memorialised as such in Palestinian history. He was much too wily not to have created a chain of command to replace him.
Any potential successor will be bred of the same strategic mindset as Sinwar. Khaled Mashal, one of Hamas’s senior leaders now in exile, insisted in September that it was prevailing in the war against the IDF and would play a central role in governing Gaza once it ended. Dismiss that as bravado if you want, but parts of the Israeli security establishment agree. Major-General Gadi Shamni, one-time commander of the IDF’s Gaza Division, said: “Hamas is winning this war… Our soldiers are winning every tactical encounter with Hamas, but we’re losing the war, and in a big way.”
Hamas’s remaining leaders know that the very best they can expect if they wave white flags are lifetime prison sentences. They have nothing to lose by continuing to fight and, like members of many Islamic resistance movements, don’t fear death but regard it as an honour. Firepower alone against adversaries of this sort won’t work; Hamas continues to fight and even fires rockets into Israel. Sinwar’s successor will be watching Israel’s northern border carefully. They will be hoping that the invasion of Lebanon plunges the IDF into a quagmire – the fate of previous Israeli invasions – and that Israel’s army and society eventually succumb to war weariness. That calculation may be utterly off the mark; but it’s what the Hamas leadership believes that matters.
Besides, some senior members of Israel’s security establishment also believe that Netanyahu’s refusal to abandon his pledge to eviscerate Hamas amounts to chasing shadows. Aside from the likelihood of having to continue the war, Israel has a litany of strategic questions to answer about the future of the Strip: its postwar government, the role of the PA, and who in Gaza is willing to cooperate and risk the accusation of traitor. If Israel’s plan is to annex part of Gaza and impose military rule, how long before thousands of vengeful angry young men who have watched their parents and siblings die join a reconstituted Hamas or a new movement that replaces it and takes up arms against Israel?
And what of the reconstruction of Gaza, which now resembles a 25-mile-long Dresden? Who will reconstruct it and who will foot the bill? Or is the plan to consign the Palestinians to survive as best they can amid the debris, a fate that will increase Israel’s already-pervasive global isolation, even in the US? Sinwar is gone but his departure will do nothing to help Israel overcome these challenges – which it must if the country hopes for an end to violent resistance in Gaza and anything resembling long-term peace.