A group of Israeli hostages were huddled in a Gaza tunnel a few days after being taken from their homes on October 7, when the man who had planned their kidnapping appeared in the gloom underground.
He had gray hair and beard, and his dark, ringed eyes peeked out from under thick black eyebrows. The face was familiar to them from thousands of television broadcasts and newspaper reports: Yahya Sinwar.
The leader of Hamas In Gaza he was the most feared man in Israel, even before ordering the October attack in which 1,200 people were killed — two-thirds of them civilians — and 250 were taken hostage.
In fluent Hebrew, honed over more than 22 years in an Israeli prison, Sinwar assured them that they were safe and would soon be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners. One of the hostages, Yocheved Lifshitz, an 85-year-old veteran peace activist from Kibbutz Nir Oz, had no time for his displays of concern for his well-being and challenged Hamas leader to the face
“I asked him how he wasn’t ashamed to do something like that to people who had supported peace all these years,” declared Lifshitz to the Davar newspaper upon his release after 16 days of captivity. “He didn’t answer. “He remained silent.”
Just over a year after the October 7 attacks, Israel has announced his death. With an entire team hunting for Sinwar, the soldiers have found his body. These soldiers were not in the area to carry out a targeted assassination nor did they have prior intelligence that Sinwar was present there, Haaretz reports. Two Israeli sources have informed CNN that Sinwar was killed in a routine military operation.
The hunt
A video recorded by Hamas security cameras around the same time as that meeting with the hostages on October 10 and found by the Israeli army a few months later shows Sinwar following his wife and three children through a strait. tunnel and disappearing into the darkness.
That was the last sighting of the man who unleashed the war of Loop. According to Gaza health authorities, more than 42,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed in a devastating Israeli response that has devastated much of the territory, driving 90% of the population from their homes and driving 2.3 million people on the verge of famine. Despite everything, the main target of the Israeli bombings has remained at large and apparently unharmed.
During all these months, the hunt for Sinwar has been a mix of advanced technology and brute force, as his pursuers have shown themselves willing to go to any extreme, even causing extremely high numbers of civilian casualties, to kill the leader of Hamas and destroy the tight circle around it.
The Hunters are a group of intelligence officers, special operations units of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), military engineers and surveillance experts under the umbrella of the Israeli Security Agency, better known by its Hebrew initials or the Shabak acronym.
Personally and institutionally, this team seeks redemption for the security failures that allowed the October 7 assault to occur. But despite their motivation, until now they had not managed to find their prey.
“If you had told me when the war started that more than 11 months later I would still be alive, it would have seemed incredible to me,” said Michael Milshtein, former head of the Palestinian affairs section of Israeli Military Intelligence (Aman). “But remember that Sinwar prepared for a decade for this offensive and IDF intelligence was very surprised by the size and length of the tunnels under Gaza and how sophisticated they were.”
The Israeli Army estimates that there are 500 kilometers of tunnels under Gaza, an entire underground city. A second major challenge, according to at least some members of the defense, is that Sinwar is likely to have surrounded himself with human shields.
Ram Ben-Barak, former deputy director of Mossad, said: “Because of the hostages, we are very careful about what we do. I think if there were no such restrictions, we would have found him more easily.”
Whether or not Sinwar has a ring of human shields around him, the possible presence of hostages has not prevented the IDF from dropping 900-kilogram high-powered bombs on suspected Hamas hideouts. Of its two main war objectives, the Netanyahu government puts the destruction of Hamas before rescuing the hostages.
There is no shortage of experts among Sinwar’s hunters. Despite the circumstances of Sinwar’s death, targeted killings have been a key tactic of the Israeli military since the founding of the state. Since World War II, Israel has killed more people than any other country in the Western world.
Yahalom, a special section within the Corps of Combat Engineers, has more experience in tunnel warfare than any of its counterparts in Western militaries, and has access to state-of-the-art, American-made ground-penetrating radar. The clandestine signals intelligence unit 8200 is a world leader in electronic warfare and has been spying on Hamas communications for decades.
The Shin Bet lost many of its sources in Gaza after Israel withdrew from the territory in 2005, but worked hard to rebuild its network of informants after Israel launched its ground invasion last October, recruiting among the desperate flows of Palestinians who They fled from the onslaught.
Despite the capabilities of this task force, it had only come close to trapping Sinwar once in a bunker beneath his hometown of Khan Yunis in late January. Sinwar had left clothes and more than a million shekels (more than £200,000) in wads of cash. Some considered this a sign of panic, although it was ultimately estimated that the Hamas leader had left a few days before Israeli forces stormed the bunker.
The hypothesis that Sinwar’s trackers were using is that he abandoned the use of electronic communication a long time ago, very aware of the skills and technology that his pursuers possess. Sinwar not only studied Hebrew in the Israeli prison, but also the habits and culture of his enemy.
“He really understands the basic instincts and deepest feelings of Israeli society,” said Milshtein, now at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center. “I’m pretty sure every move he makes is based on his understanding of Israel.”
Sinwar had continued to communicate with the outside world, although with apparent difficulty. Lengthy ceasefire negotiations in Cairo and Doha were often interrupted as messages were sent to and from the underground commander. A strong possibility is that Sinwar used human messengers to remain in command, drawn from a small and dwindling coterie of aides he trusts, starting with his brother Mohammed, a top military commander in Gaza.
The team pursuing Sinwar had hoped that the need to maintain contact with couriers, to give orders and control hostage negotiations, would prove their undoing, just as one courier led American trackers for several years. to Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad (Pakistan).
It is believed that it was a courier who led the Israeli hunters to their biggest scalp of the war so far. At 10:30 a.m. on July 13, Mohammed Deifthe veteran Hamas commander who had topped Israel’s most wanted list since 1995, emerged from a hideout near a displaced persons camp in al-Mawasi to take to the air with a close lieutenant, Rafa’a Salameh. In an instant, both were killed by bombs dropped by Israeli fighters (according to the IDF version) along with dozens of Palestinians. Hamas insists that Deif is still alive, but has not been seen since.
Many members of Israeli security lamented what they considered a historic missed opportunity in September 2003, when they had planes prepared to bomb a house where the entire Hamas leadership was meeting. After furious discussions in the military chain of command, the air force used a precision missile fired at the supposed meeting room, instead of leveling the entire building with a hail of bombs, for fear of civilian casualties. They went to the wrong room and the Hamas leaders survived.
By July of this year, the likelihood of killing large numbers of civilians was no longer an obstacle. For attack Deifthe air force used 900 kilo bombs, the same ones that the Biden Administration had stopped sending in May due to their indiscriminate destructive force. Israel reportedly launched eight of them on July 13. 90 Palestinians from the surrounding area were killed and almost 300 injured.
“It seems that the main source of the attack on Mohammed Deif, the one who actually gave the information about his location, was a human source: one of those messengers who go from one tunnel or shelter to another and carry messages between one commander and another,” Milstein said.
Yossi Melman, co-author of Spies against Armageddon and author of other books on Israeli intelligence, said Deif may have made a mistake that Sinwar was unlikely to repeat.
“Deif was maybe more arrogant or maybe he thought that they had tried to kill him so many times, that maybe God was with him,” says Melman. “The Shabak and the army were waiting for this opportunity. All these targeted killings are about waiting for a small mistake from the other party. But Sinwar is more cautious. “He is not a military commander who has shown himself among his people.”
It had even been said that it was possible that Sinwar was on the other side of the border, hiding in a tunnel on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border. But “it is in their basic DNA to stay in Gaza and fight to the death. He would rather die in his bunker,” says Milshtein.
Sinwar’s death is undoubtedly celebrated as a major military success by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which has made the destruction of Hamas’s “military and governance capabilities” a primary war objective. Another question is whether it would stop the war.
“The situation will be much better, perhaps for a couple of weeks,” said Ben-Barak. “Then another will come. “It is an ideological war, not a war about Sinwar.”
“After almost 50 years of murder, we understand that it is a basic part of the game. Sometimes it is necessary to assassinate a very prominent leader. But when you start to think that this will change the rules of the game and that an ideological organization will collapse because one of its leaders is killed, it is a total mistake,” explains Milshtein.
“If Sinwar is killed, there will be someone else… You can’t create a fantasy. “That won’t end the war.”
This article was published on September 14, 2024 and has been updated by elDiario.es.
Translation of Javier Biosca
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