It was a routine patrol for a unit of Israeli soldiers in the southern Gaza Strip. Then a firefight erupted and the Israelis, backed by drones, destroyed part of a building where several militants had taken cover, Israeli officials said. When the dust cleared and they began searching the building, the soldiers found a body that bore a striking resemblance to someone they had not expected to find, a man their country had been hunting for since Oct 7, 2023: Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas chief.
For more than a year, as tens of thousands were killed in Gaza, Sinwar had eluded the Israel’s military and security establishment, which had dedicated every means at its disposal to finding and killing him. Many believed he was hiding underground in Gaza and had surrounded himself with hostages taken from Israel. In the end, the Israeli officials said, he was killed above ground on Wednesday, alongside two other militants, with no sign of hostages nearby. Israeli authorities said they had confirmed his death Thursday, using dental records and fingerprints. His DNA was also tested for confirmation, according to one Israeli official and the White House.
In Gaza, the soldiers who unexpectedly encountered Sinwar on Wednesday were part of a unit training to be squad commanders. After the firefight killed Sinwar and two other fighters, the Israelis found the area littered with explosives and approached the bodies cautiously. They found money and weapons, according to one Israeli official. Photographs obtained by NYT, some of which later circulated online, show the body of a man with facial features strongly resembling Sinwar’s. The body had severe wounds, including to the head and leg.
Sinwar died after Israeli soldiers and intelligence agents had spent months trying to locate him, finding clues but never managing to trap him, an Israeli military spokesperson, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, told reporters. Sinwar’s DNA had been found at one point in a tunnel a few hundred meters from where the bodies of six Israeli hostages were found six weeks ago, Hagari said. Israel collected DNA information from Sinwar during his decades-long incarceration inside Israeli jails.
