After a year of persecution with the most advanced technology, the best Israeli special forces and the help of the United States, Yahya Sinwar seems to have finally been murdered by regular soldiers who happened upon him by chance and who did not even know who they had killed. .
The head of Sinwar, the elusive Hamas leader and mastermind of the October 7 attacks against Israel, was the most sought after by Israel. According to the first information, the soldiers were not part of an operation to assassinate him and did not even have information that he could be nearby. They did not realize that Sinwar was the person they had killed until they looked closely at his face and found his identity documents.
Until finding him, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have destroyed much of the Gaza Strip and have ended the lives of more than 42,000 Palestinians, expelling 2 million people from their homes – almost the entire population. population-; a human disaster that Israel has carried out after the surprise attack by Hamas, in which more than 1,200 Israelis died and another 250 were kidnapped.
Before his death, the last time Sinwar had been seen was a few days after the October 7 attack, when he appeared in the darkness of a Gaza underground tunnel to speak to a group of hostages. In fluent Hebrew, perfected during his more than 22 years in an Israeli prisonSinwar assured them that they were safe and would soon be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners.
One of the hostages was Yocheved Lifshitz (85)veteran peace activist kibbutz Nir Oz, who replied to the Hamas leader: “I asked him how it was possible that he was not ashamed to do something like that to people who had supported peace all these years,” the woman told the newspaper Davar when she was released, after 16 days of captivity. “[Sinwar] “He didn’t answer, he stayed silent.”
Months later, the Israeli Army found a video that had been recorded by Hamas security cameras at approximately the same time that day, October 10. It showed Sinwar following his wife and three children through a narrow tunnel until they disappeared into the darkness.
Brute force, advanced technology and massacre of civilians
The fierce manhunt that Israel unleashed after the attacks has required a combination of brute force and advanced technology. Sinwar’s pursuers have demonstrated their willingness to go to any lengths to kill the Hamas leader and destroy his entourage, even at the cost of a massacre of civilian casualties.
Under the authority of the Israeli Security Agency (better known as Shabak or Shin Bet), the hunters It consisted of spy officers, IDF special operations units, military engineers and surveillance experts. A group with institutional and personal reasons to be forgiven the security failures that made the October 7 attack possible.
Despite this, they have gone through more than a year of frustrations. “If when the war started they had told me that [Sinwar] I would still be alive [un año después]”It would have seemed incredible to me,” admitted Michael Milshtein, former head of the Palestinian Affairs section of Israel’s Military Intelligence (known as Aman). “But remember that Sinwar prepared for this offensive for a decade, the IDF spy services were very surprised by the size and length of the tunnels under Gaza, and their sophistication.”
Some members of the Israeli defense thought that Sinwar would surround himself with hostages to use as human shieldsalthough others maintained that this would delay their movements and put the people around them in the spotlight. It is true that the risk of ending the lives of hostages did not prevent the IDF from launching 900 kilo bombs against targets where they said there could be Hamas leaders.
According to information provided by Israel, no trace of the hostages was eventually found in the vicinity of Sinwar when he was discovered and killed. He was apparently in the company of only two men.
If Sinwar’s persecutors shared one attribute, it was experience: selective assassinations have been a fundamental strategy of the Army since the creation of the State of Israel. The country has killed more people than any other in the Western world since World War II.
Within the Corps of Combat Engineers, the Yahalom special section has more experience in tunnel warfare than any similar one in the West, in addition to having the latest generation American radars for this type of infrastructure. After decades spying on Hamas communications, the Israeli clandestine unit 8200 is a world leader in electronic warfare.
The Shin Bet lost many of its sources in Gaza in 2005, when Israel ended its presence inside the territory, but since the ground invasion began in October 2023 it has worked hard to rebuild the network of informants, recruiting them among the flows. of Palestinians fleeing desperately from the onslaught.
Before Thursday’s deadly encounter and despite the formidable capabilities of the task force created to catch Sinwar, it only came close to catching him on one occasion. It was at the end of January in a bunker under his hometown, Khan Yunis, in southern Gaza. In his escape, the leader had left behind clothes and more than a million shekels [unos 250.000 euros] in wads of bills. Although some thought it was a sign of panic when he escaped, the latest assessment is that Sinwar had left there days before the assault on the bunker by Israeli forces.
Sinwar, incommunicado
One of the hypotheses of the team dedicated to tracking him was that Sinwar had abandoned any type of electronic communication, aware as he was of the technological skills and tools of his pursuers.
In the Israeli prison Sinwar not only studied Hebrew. Also, the habits and culture of your enemy. According to Milshtein, who now works at Tel Aviv University within the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle East and African Studies, Sinwar “truly understands the basic instincts and deepest feelings of Israeli society.” “I’m pretty sure that every move he makes is based on his understanding of Israel,” he said.
During his year in hiding, Sinwar maintained communication with the outside world, although with apparent difficulty. The long and fruitless negotiations for a ceasefire, mediated by Egypt and Qatar, were often interrupted by the time that passed between the sending of the messages to the underground commander and his response.
The dominant theory is that to stay in command, Sinwar used messengers, starting with his brother Mohammed, the top military commander in Gaza. These people were part of a small and increasingly select clique of helpers whom he trusted.
The team pursuing him was betting on Sinwar’s need to use messengers to give orders and control hostage negotiations. They hoped that the couriers would end up being their downfall, as they were for Osama bin Laden, whose hideout in Abbottabad (Pakistan) was discovered by following one of them, after years of searching by the American team that tracked him down.
It is also believed that it was a courier who led the trackers to Mohammed Deif, the greatest Israeli war trophy before Sinwar. At 10:30 a.m. on July 13, the veteran Hamas commander and first on Israel’s most wanted list since 1995, came up for air from a hiding place near the Al Mawasi displaced persons camp. He was accompanied by Rafaa Salameh, a close lieutenant.
According to the IDF version, bombs dropped by Israeli fighters killed the two in an instant. Also dozens of Palestinians. But according to Hamas, Deif is not dead. The truth is that it has not been seen since then.
Many members of the Israeli security services regretted the apparent historic opportunity they missed in September 2003, when their planes were prepared to bomb the house where the entire Hamas leadership was meeting. Instead of destroying the entire building with a hail of bombs, for fear of civilian victims, after discussions in the military chain of command, the Israeli aviation launched a precision missile against the supposed meeting room. They went to the wrong room and the Hamas leaders survived.
The probability of killing a large number of civilians had ceased to be an obstacle in July 2024. For the attack on Deif, the aircraft used 900 kilo bombs, the same ones whose shipment the Biden Administration had suspended in May due to their indiscriminate destruction. . Israel apparently dropped eight such bombs on July 13. 90 Palestinians were killed and almost 300 injured.
Assassinate a prominent leader
According to Yossi Melman, co-author of ‘Spies Against Armageddon’ and author of other books on Israeli espionage, it is possible that Deif made a mistake that Sinwar had managed to avoid. “Maybe Deif was more arrogant or maybe he said to himself ‘they tried to kill me so many times, I lost an eye and an arm but even then I survived, so maybe God is with me’.” “The Shabak and the Army were waiting for this opportunity, the basis of all these selective assassinations is waiting for a small mistake from the other party,” Melman explained.
Last year, the possibility of a deal for Sinwar’s exile was on the table at talks in Cairo and Doha. Some suggested that Sinwar could have crossed the border and been hiding in Egyptian territory, in a tunnel in the city of Rafah. But these theories underestimated the ideological zeal of a man who had risen through the ranks of Hamas by standing out as the executioner of alleged informants.
“It is in the most basic of his DNA, to stay in Gaza and fight to the death, he will prefer to die in his bunker,” predicted a few months ago Milshtein, who in the Military Intelligence Service was dedicated to studying Sinwar and other Hamas leaders. .
If that is true, Sinwar has died fulfilling his wish. Given the determination of both parties, perhaps this death was written in their destiny. Sinwar would never leave or surrender, and if the hunt led by high-tech spy services failed, Israel would raze Gaza to death.
Another question is whether his death serves to stop the war. As Ram Ben-Barak, former deputy director of the Mossad (foreign intelligence service), said, after the fall of Sinwar “another will come.” “It is an ideological war, not a Sinwar war.”
“After almost 50 years of murder, we understand that this is a fundamental part of the game. “Sometimes you have to assassinate a very prominent leader,” Milshtein said. “But to start thinking that this will change the rules of the game and that an ideological organization will collapse by killing one of its leaders is a total mistake,” he added. “You cannot fantasize, this is not going to end the war.”
Translation of Francisco de Zárate
#Israel #managed #kill #Yahya #Sinwar #Gaza #chance #plan
