After a year hunting its most wanted target in Hamas’s tunnels beneath Gaza, it appears Israel claimed its quarry during a chance encounter in the ruined streets of the coastal strip.
When Israeli troops saw Hamas fighters enter a building in Rafah, they had no reason to suspect one of them was their country’s most wanted man.
For months, a specialist elite taskforce had been seeking the terrorist leader behind the Oct 7 attacks and he was widely thought to be hidden deep beneath the ground.
The troops called for a tank to fire into the building, causing much of it to collapse, Israel’s Channel 12 reported.
It was only when afterwards soldiers found three bodies in the rubble, that they were struck by how familiar one dead man seemed.
The dead middle-aged man, wearing a military-style vest and lying half submerged beneath debris with the front of his head smashed in, had a familiar looking mole next to his left eye, troops noticed.
Troops entering the building decided he looked “very much like” Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader considered the architect of last year’s Oct 7 attack against Israel.
Prising open his lips with a piece of wood, troops also believed that his worn and chipped teeth matched photos of the Hamas leader’s mouth.
With the area where he was found littered with booby traps and his vest containing at least three grenades, soldiers were said to be unable to recover the body immediately.
Later, a picture was released of troops carrying the body wrapped in a black body bag and strapped into a stretcher.
DNA samples were recovered for testing and photographs of his teeth were taken to be checked against dental records.
The results were on Thursday night released by Israeli officials, confirming that they had killed the leader of Hamas.
As news of the killing spread, Yoav Gallant, the defence minister, said the country would “reach every terrorist and eliminate them”.
Quoting the biblical book of Leviticus, he added: “You will pursue your enemies, and they will fall before you by the sword.”
A video released by an Israeli newspaper, showed people on a Tel Aviv beach clapping and cheering after a man said “Bye bye, Sinwar” over a loudspeaker.
“Well done IDF. No [terrorists] will remain. Whoever harms Israeli citizens, that’ll be his end,” the man speaking over the loudspeaker added.
Sinwar’s death marked the end of a manhunt for the terrorist leader that Israel had declared a “dead man walking”. The attacks on Oct 7 marked the deadliest single day for the state of Israel, when Hamas fighters rampaged into southern Israel, killing around 1,200 and taking some 250 hostages back to Gaza.
The attack provoked massive Israeli retaliation against Hamas in Gaza, in a campaign of air strikes and ground offensives which have killed more than 42,000 people, according to the strip’s Hamas-run health ministry. Much of the strip is destroyed and huge numbers have been forced from their homes.
Israel’s military called Sinwar the “face of evil” and vowed he would be eliminated after the attacks.
But while many of Hamas top leadership were killed in the months that followed, including deputies like Marwan Issa and Mohammed Deif, Sinwar himself remained more elusive.
The only image of him released in the past year was grainy black and white footage of him walking through a tunnel with his family on Oct 10 last year.
The clip showed Sinwar, carrying a bag and wearing flip flops, with his children and wife walking through a tunnel under a cemetery in the Bani Suheila area, in Khan Younis.
Yet the clip was only found four months later, when Israeli soldiers reached the scene.
At the time, the Israeli military said the tunnel contained “bedrooms of senior Hamas officials and the office of the commander of the Khan Younis Brigade’s Eastern Battalion, from where he directed the attack on Oct 7”.
Senior Hamas officials resided in the compound in “comfortable conditions” with food and bathrooms, along with safes with “personal funds of millions of shekels and dollars in cash”.
With Sinwar thought to be somewhere in the extensive network of tunnels that Israel said it had found beneath Gaza, the job of hunting him fell to a taskforce of intelligence officers, special operations units, military engineers and surveillance experts.
As the months went on, Israeli officials repeatedly said they had got close to him.
In December, Mr Netanyahu announced that Israeli troops had surrounded Mr Sinwar’s home in Khan Younis.
“I said last night that our forces could reach anywhere in the Gaza Strip. Now, they are encircling Sinwar’s home. His home is not his fortress, and while he may flee, it is only a matter of time until we get him,” Mr Netanyahu said.
In August, the outgoing commander of the IDF’s 98th Division, Brig Gen Dan Goldfus, told Channel 12 that the army was “minutes” away from catching the Hamas leader.
He said: “We were close. We were in his compound. We got to an underground compound. We found a lot of money there. The coffee was still hot. Weapons strewn around.”
With little information emerging about him, rumours that he was already dead also swirled.
Speculation had heightened recently when it was noticed that a recent government picture of a high-level military meeting showed a Hamas organisational chart, with a question mark over Sinwar’s head.
But American officials earlier this month said that while his communications had gone quiet, there was no evidence he was dead and instead they thought he was alive and still making decisions.
Their assessment of the fugitive was that he was isolated and hiding in Gaza.
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Concerned that communicating with an electronic device would quickly see him tracked down by electronic eavesdropping, he instead was resorting to a network of human couriers.
Aware that Israel was closing in on him, and after seeing several of his senior comrades killed by Israel, he had long decided he would not survive the war.
But just as he was more fatalistic, he was also judged to be increasingly inflexible.
Sinwar was determined to see Israel become embroiled in a wider regional conflict that would force Benjamin Netanyahu to scale back his Gaza offensive.
As his attitude hardened, he was thought to have no intention of reaching any deal with Israel to stop the conflict.
Israeli hostages also said they had met him during their captivity, when he spoke to them in near-accentless Hebrew to reassure them after they were dragged into Gaza.
At other times, Israeli officials said they believed he was hiding in tunnels surrounded by hostages used as human shields to prevent air strikes.
Israel said there were no hostages found in the building where his body was recovered.
When the end came Hamas sources said he was surrounded by a security detail of no more than two or three people.
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