Israel announced on Thursday that its forces killed Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar in a Gaza operation, delivering a significant blow to the group it has been battling since the October 7, 2023 attack.
“The mass murderer Yahya Sinwar, responsible for the massacre and atrocities of October 7, was eliminated… by IDF (Israeli military) soldiers,” Foreign Minister Israel Katz said in a statement.
The military later confirmed that “after a year-long pursuit”, soldiers “eliminated Yahya Sinwar, the leader of the Hamas terrorist organisation, in an operation in the southern Gaza Strip” on Wednesday.
Hamas has not confirmed his death.
Israel had accused Sinwar of masterminding the October 7 attack, the deadliest in Israeli history, and had been hunting him down since the start of the Gaza war.
He rose through the ranks of the Palestinian militant group to become first its leader in Gaza, then its overall head after the killing in July of political chief Ismail Haniyeh.
Israel’s announcement on Sinwar comes weeks after it assassinated Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in a massive strike in Lebanon, where the Israeli military has been at war since late September.
A slew of other Iran-backed militant commanders have also been killed in recent months.
Israel said earlier this year that it had killed Mohammed Deif, Hamas’s military chief, though the Palestinian group has not confirmed it.
Deif stood accused of planning, with Sinwar, the October 7 attack.
With Hamas massively weakened more than a year into the Gaza war, Sinwar’s death could deal a seismic blow to the organisation.
Before the Israeli foreign minister confirmed Sinwar’s death, the military said in a brief statement that during “operations in the Gaza Strip, three terrorists were eliminated”, with the Hamas leader possibly one of them.
An Israeli security official told AFP that the military was conducting a DNA test on a militant’s body to confirm whether it was Sinwar’s.
In a post on X, Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said the country would “reach every terrorist and eliminate them”.
US President Joe Biden was briefed aboard Air Force One while heading to Germany and was being kept informed of developments, a US official said Thursday.
