Purported drone footage shows Yahya Sinwar’s final moments before he was killed by Israeli forces

Though he was Israel’s most-wanted man, Sinwar’s death came unexpectedly even for the Israeli forces who appeared to have run across him unknowingly in a battle

Israel, on Thursday (October 17, 2024), announced that its armed forces had killed Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, after what it called a “lengthy hunt.”

The killing of Sinwar, widely regarded as the chief architect of the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, coming just 10 days after Israelis and Palestinians marked a year since the deadliest fighting in their decades-old conflict erupted.

His death also adds to Israel’s growing list of assassinated Hamas and Hezbollah (Lebanon’s militant group backed by Iran) leaders, who have been targeted since October 7, 2023. Previously, Israel killed Ismail Haniyeh — who was seen as the overall leader of Hamas — on July 31, 2024, and followed it up with the killing of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah.

Sinwar killing updates: October 18, 2024

In Pictures: Israel-Hamas war — a year on

October 7, 2023: Hamas militants stormed across the border from Gaza into Israel in what would become the deadliest attack in the country’s history. At the end of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, the militants launched their assault by land, air, and sea. Militants abducted 251 hostages on October 7, 97 of whom are still captive in Gaza, including 33 the Israeli military has said are dead.

Soon after the attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced “We are at war.” He declared a mass army mobilization. “Not an ‘operation,’ not a ‘round,’ but at war.” Israel battered Gaza on October 8 after suffering its bloodiest attack in decades, when Hamas fighters rampaged through Israeli towns killing 600 and abducting dozens more, as the spiralling violence threatened a major new war in West Asia. Israeli air strikes hit housing blocks, tunnels, a mosque, and the homes of Hamas officials in Gaza, killing more than 370 people, including 20 children, as Mr. Netanyahu vowed “mighty vengeance for this black day”.

October 27, 2023: Internet and phone services collapsed in the Gaza Strip under intensified bombardment, largely cutting off its 2.3 million people from the outside world and each other, as Israel’s military “expanded” its ground operations in the besieged territory. The military’s announcement signalled it was moving closer to an all-out invasion of Gaza, where it has vowed to crush the ruling Hamas group after its bloody incursion in southern Israel three weeks ago. This screen grab taken from handout footage released by the Israeli army on October 26, 2023, shows a "targeted raid" in northern Gaza with tanks and infantry.

November 2023: Israeli forces struck near several hospitals in Gaza City as the military pushed deeper into dense urban neighborhoods in its battle with Hamas militants, prompting increasing numbers of civilians to flee toward the south of the besieged territory. Israel accused Hamas fighters of hiding in hospitals and using the Shifa Hospital complex as its main command center, which the militant group and hospital staff deny, saying Israel is creating a pretext to strike it. In this photo from November 6, 2023, a man walks between the bodies wrapped in shrouds of those killed in Israeli bombardment in Deir Balah in the central Gaza Strip, at the Shuhada Al-Aqsa hospital in the same city.

November 24, 2023: After 48 days of gunfire and bombardment that claimed thousands of lives, a four-day truce in the Israel-Hamas war began. Palestinian prisoners (wearing grey jumpers) cheer after being released from the Israeli Ofer military facility in Baytunia in the occupied West Bank in exchange for hostages freed by Hamas in Gaza, on November 24, 2023.

February 29, 2024: Israeli forces in war-torn Gaza opened fire on a crowd of Palestinians at an aid distribution point on February 29, killing at least 104 people and wounding over 700 according to Palestinian health officials. A witness told AFP that the violence unfolded when thousands of people desperate for food rushed towards aid trucks at the city’s western Nabulsi roundabout. This image grab from a handout video released by the Israeli Army shows what the Army says are Gazans around aid trucks in Gaza City.

March 2024: The U.N. warned that Israel’s severe restrictions on aid into war-ravaged Gaza coupled with its military offensive could amount to using starvation as a “weapon of war”, which would be a “war crime”. The devastating war since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel has left roughly half of Gazans — around 1.1 million people — experiencing “catastrophic” hunger, the assessment said. In this photo from October 2023, Palestinian children receive food at a UN-run school in Rafah, on the southern Gaza Strip.

March 2, 2024: U.S. military C-130 cargo planes dropped food in pallets over Gaza. The airdrop was the first of many announced by President Joe Biden on. The aid was be coordinated with Jordan, which has also conducted airdrops to deliver food to Gaza. Since the war began on Oct 7, Israel barred entry of food, water, medicine and other supplies, except for a trickle of aid entering the south from Egypt at the Rafah crossing and Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing.

April 2, 2024: An Israeli airstrike kills six international aid workers with the World Central Kitchen charity and their Palestinian driver, hours after it brought a new shipload of food into northern Gaza. Footage showed the bodies of the dead at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah. Several of them wore protective gear with the charity’s logo. In this photo, a man displays the blood-stained British, Polish, and Australian passports.

April 13, 2024: Iran launched multiple drones toward Israel, marking the first time Iran had ever launched a full-scale military assault on Israel, despite decades of enmity dating back to the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran had been threatening to attack Israel since an airstrike last week killed two Iranian generals in Syria. Israel has not commented on that attack, but Iran accused it of being behind it. This photo shows an anti-missile system operates after Iran launched drones and missiles towards Israel, as seen from Ashkelon, Israel.

May 7, 2024: An Israeli tank brigade seized control on of the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing with Egypt as Israel moved forward with an offensive in the southern city. Israeli tanks moved into the southern part of the city overnight, while warplanes bombed areas near the crucial Rafah border crossing, killing at least 23 Palestinians and injuring several others. The invasion, described by the U.S. as a “limited operation,” unfolded a day after the Israeli military ordered over a million people sheltering in Rafah to evacuate parts of the southern Gaza Strip city and relocate to an “expanded humanitarian zone” near Khan Younis, in preparation for an assault to “eradicate” Hamas. Photo shows Israeli military vehicles operate in the Gazan side of the Rafah Crossing.

July 27, 2024: A rocket attack on a soccer field in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights killed 12 children and wounded several others, hours after an Israeli airstrike on south Lebanon killed three members of the militant Hezbollah group. The strike, the deadliest attack on an Israeli target since the fighting between the two foes erupted in October 2023, raised fears of of a broader conflagration in the region. This photo shows mourners from the Druze minority surround the bodies of some of the 12 children and teens killed in a rocket strike at a soccer field, during their funeral, in the village of Majdal Shams, in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights.

July 31, 2024: The political leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in an Israeli strike in Iran, where he had been attending the inauguration of the country’s new president. Haniyeh was elected head of the Hamas political bureau in 2017 to succeed Khaled Meshaal, but was already a well-known figure having become Palestinian prime minister in 2006. This photo shows Iranians follow a truck, center, carrying the coffins of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and his bodyguard, during their funeral ceremony at Enqelab-e-Eslami (Islamic Revolution) Sq. in Tehran, Iran, on August 1, 2024.

August 28, 2024: Israel pressed on with a large-scale military operation in the occupied West Bank. Hamas said 10 of its fighters were killed in various locations, and the Palestinian Health Ministry reported an 11th casualty, without saying whether he was a fighter or a civilian. An Israeli vehicle operates on the road during an Israeli raid in Nour Shams camp in Tulkarm, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on August 29, 2024.

September 18, 2024: In a sophisticated, remote attack, pagers used by hundreds of members of Hezbollah exploded almost simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria killing at least nine people — including an 8-year-old girl — and wounding thousands more. A Lebanese army bomb disposal specialist wearing a protective gear prepares, with his comrade, to detonate a walkie-talkie that was found at the parking of the American University Hospital, in Beirut, Lebanon.

September 27, 2024: A wave of air raids hit Beirut’s southern suburbs early on as Israel stepped up attacks on Hezbollah, after a massive strike on the Iran-backed movement’s command centre that ended up killing the group's leader Hassan Nasrallah. Photo shows smoke rising above Beirut's southern suburbs on September 27, 2024.

October 1, 2024: Iran fired a salvo of ballistic missiles at Israel in retaliation for Israel’s campaign against Tehran’s Hezbollah allies in Lebanon. Iran has vowed to retaliate following attacks that killed the top leadership of its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon. The firing of missiles came after Israel said its troops had launched ground raids into Lebanon, though it described the forays as limited. People are seen visiting the site of the remains of an Iranian missile in the Negev desert near Arad in the aftermath of an Iranian missile attack on Israel.

A combination picture shows Palestinian woman Inas Abu Maamar, 36, embracing the body of her 5-year-old niece Saly, who was killed in an Israeli strike, at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, on October 17, 2023 (L). Reuters photographer Mohammed Salem won the prestigious 2024 World Press Photo of the Year award for this image. In the second image Inas visits a damaged cemetery where Saly was buried, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, on September 11, 2024.
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Israeli forces were not targetting Sinwar, chanced upon him in Rafah

Though he was Israel’s most-wanted man, Sinwar’s death came unexpectedly even for the Israeli forces who appeared to have run across him unknowingly in a battle, only to discover afterwards that the body in the rubble was his.

In a drone video, posted on X by several Israeli officials purpotedly showing Sinwar’s final moments, the former Hamas chief is seen covered in dust, sitting on a chair, in a room of a building hollowed-out by airstrikes. As the drone moves closer to him, Sinwar appears to throw a stick at the drone.

According to the Israeli military, an additional shell was then at the building, causing it to collapse and killing Sinwar. Israel military spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari Sinwar was found with a bulletproof vest, grenades, and 40,000 shekels ($10,707). He added that his troops had identified three Hamas militants running from building to building in Gaza’s southernmost city, Rafah. Sinwar, turned out to be one of them. The troops attempted to shoot them before they ran inside a building.

Photos circulating online showed the body of a man resembling Sinwar with a gaping head wound, dressed in a military-style vest, half buried in the rubble of a destroyed building. The security official confirmed the photos were taken by Israeli security officials at the scene. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.

Hamas has not confirmed his death.

The military said three militants were killed in the operation. Police said one of them was confirmed as Sinwar by dental records, fingerprints and DNA tests. Sinwar was imprisoned by Israel from the late 1980s until 2011, and during that time he underwent treatment for brain cancer — leaving Israeli authorities with extensive medical records.

Netanyahu says Sinwar killing ‘beginning of the end’ of Gaza war

 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the killing of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar in the Gaza Strip was the “beginning of the end” of the year-long war in the Palestinian territory.

Mr. Netanyahu, who vowed to crush Hamas at the start of the war, hailed Sinwar’s killing, saying: “While this is not the end of the war in Gaza, it’s the beginning of the end.”

(With inputs from agencies)

Published - October 18, 2024 01:32 pm IST