Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar killed during gun battle

His death ended months of searching by Israel

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was killed during a gun battle in southern Gaza on Wednesday by Israeli troops who were initially unaware they had caught their country's number one enemy, Israeli officials said.

Intelligence services had been searching for Sinwar for months and had been gradually restricting the area where he could operate, the military said on Thursday, after dental records, fingerprints and DNA testing provided confirmation of Sinwar's death.

Hamas has not made any comment itself, but sources within the group have said the indications they have seen suggest Sinwar was killed by Israeli troops.

“The dozens of operations carried out by the IDF and the ISA over the past year, and in recent weeks in the area where he was eliminated, restricted Yahya Sinwar’s operational movement as he was pursued by the forces and led to his elimination,” the Israeli military said.

However, unlike other militant leaders tracked down and killed by Israel, including Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif, who was killed in an Israeli air strike on July 13, the operation which killed Sinwar was not a planned and targeted strike.

Instead, officials said he was found by infantry soldiers searching an area in the Tal El Sultan area of southern Gaza on Wednesday, where they believed senior members of Hamas were located.

The troops saw three suspected militants moving between buildings and opened fire, leading to a gunfight during which Sinwar escaped into a ruined building.

According to accounts in Israeli media, tank shells and a missile were also fired at the building.

On Thursday, the military released footage from a mini drone that it said showed Sinwar, badly wounded in the hand, sitting on a chair with his face covered with a scarf. The film shows him attempting to throw a stick at the drone in a futile effort to knock it down.

At this stage, Israeli military spokesperson rear admiral Daniel Hagari said, Sinwar was only identified as a fighter, but troops entered and found him with a weapon, a flak jacket and 40,000 shekels (R189,000).

“He tried to escape and our forces eliminated him,” he told reporters in a televised briefing.

In the last months of his life, Sinwar, the main architect of the October 7 2023 attack on Israel that set off the war in Gaza, appears to have stopped using telephones and other communication equipment that would have allowed Israel's powerful intelligence services to track him down.

Israeli officials said they believed he was hiding in one of the vast network of tunnels that Hamas dug beneath Gaza over the past two decades, but as more have been uncovered by Israeli troops, =the tunnels were no guarantee of escaping capture.

The head of Israel's military, Lt-Gen Herzi Halevi, said Israel's pursuit of Sinwar over the past year drove him “to act like a fugitive, causing him to change locations manye= times”.

Israeli officials, who knew Sinwar as a ruthless and committed enemy, were long concerned he had surrounded himself with some of the 101 Israeli and foreign hostages held in Gaza as a human shield to protect himself from Israeli attacks.

However, no hostages were found nearby when he was trapped on Wednesday, though Hagari said samples of his DNA were located in a tunnel a few hundred metres from where six Israeli hostages were executed by Hamas at the end of August. 

Reuters