Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was tracked by an Israeli mini drone as he hid in the ruins of a building in southern Gaza. He was filmed slumped in a chair, face completely covered. The video showed him throwing a stick at the drone, in an apparent act of desperation.
The hunt for Sinwar had lasted for more than a year. The Israeli troops who killed him were initially unaware that they had caught their country’s number one enemy, Israeli officials said.
Intelligence services had gradually narrowed down the area from where he could operate, the military said. Confirmation of his death came after his dental records, fingerprints and DNA were matched with samples taken earlier when he was an Israeli prisoner.
Unplanned Strike On Sinwar?
Unlike other militant leaders tracked down and killed by Israel, the killing of Sinwar was not planned, nor was this a targeted strike, or an operation carried out by elite commandos.
Instead, officials said he was found by infantry soldiers from the Bislach Brigade, a unit that normally trains future unit commanders. The soldiers were searching 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.
Drone Footage Of Sinwar
On Thursday, the military released footage from a mini drone that showed Sinwar, badly wounded in the hand, sitting on a chair, his face covered in 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, wearing a flak jacket and 40,000 shekels ($10,731.63).
“He tried to escape and our forces eliminated him,” he told reporters in a televised briefing.
Hamas has not made any comment but sources in the group have said that the indications are Sinwar was indeed killed by Israeli troops.
“The dozens of operations carried out by the IDF and the ISA over the last 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 in a statement.
No Communication Equipment
In the last months of his life, Sinwar, the main architect of the Oct. 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 networks of tunnels that Hamas dug beneath Gaza over the past two decades, but as more and more have been uncovered by Israeli troops, even the tunnels were no guarantee of escaping capture.
The head of Israel’s military, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, said Israel’s pursuit of Sinwar over the past year drove him “to act like a fugitive, causing him to change locations multiple times”.
Israeli officials, who knew Sinwar as a ruthless and committed enemy, were long concerned that he had surrounded himself with some of the 101 Israeli and foreign hostages still held in Gaza as a human shield to protect himself from Israeli attacks.
But no hostages were found nearby when he was finally trapped on Wednesday, although 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.
(with inputs from Reuters)
