The killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is a key milestone for Israel in its ongoing, grinding effort to destroy the Palestinian Islamist movement in Gaza. The details of the killing show the extent to which Hamas no longer has any depth of control over any part of Gaza.
Earlier in the war, Sinwar would have been located deep within several circles of protection. The approach of danger would have been identified by the outer circle, and the leader moved to a new place of hiding. This is evidently no longer possible for Hamas. When troops of the IDF’s 450th Brigade were on a routine sweep in Rafat, they identified suspicious figures entering a building and opened fire on it. The Hamas leader had nowhere to run. Fleeing to an adjacent structure, he was then killed when a tank shell brought the building down on top of him.
It was a notably undramatic end to Sinwar’s career, testimony in its details to the low ebb to which he has brought the movement to which he dedicated his life. His Gaza fiefdom is now a smoking ruin, under the effective control of the IDF. Hamas remains in the form of beleaguered, increasingly isolated groups of fighters. They are still able to inflict damage on the Israelis, but only on a sporadic and localised level.
There is no reason to believe that the Hamas leader would have felt any pangs of regret for the ruin and suffering he caused his own people.
Still, there is no reason to believe that the Hamas leader would have felt any pangs of regret for the ruin and suffering he caused his own people. Sinwar, from the Khan Yunis refugee camp, followed a straight and single path throughout his career, and he followed it to the end. That path was based on the unwavering belief, as laid out in article 11 of Hamas’s covenant, that ‘the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [endowment] consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up.’
The trajectory of Sinwar’s career in its last stage, from what he undoubtedly regarded as the triumph of the 7 October massacres to the building collapsing on him in Rafah, was ultimately the product of two misunderstandings, one on the part of Sinwar’s enemies, the second on the part of the Hamas leader himself and those around him.
Israel failed to understand the depth of the Hamas leader and his associates’ commitment to their path. Wrongly, Israel assumed that Sinwar, like his forebears in the Fatah movement, was available for co-optation, and could be tempted away from the path of jihad by the attractions of power and material inducement.
Secure in this utterly mistaken belief, Israel felt able to release Sinwar and 1,026 other convicted terrorists in 2011, to secure the freedom of a single Israeli combat soldier who had fallen into Hamas’s hands. The Shalit deal, through which Sinwar returned to Gaza and the path that led to his death, is the key precipitating factor leading to 7 October and what has followed. This fact is not prominent in the Israeli internal debate, because Benjamin Netanyahu carried out the deal, and his main opponents supported it. So no one can make political capital by recalling it.
The mistaken view according to which Sinwar could be turned into a kind of tacit partner persisted throughout the subsequent decade, encouraged, of course, by the Hamas leader and his associates themselves. The bundles of Qatari cash, and the limited responses to aggression from Gaza were products of this misunderstanding. It ended in the absurdity of the tiny number of soldiers – just under 700 – guarding the border on 7 October 2023.
Sinwar’s identification of this cardinal error in Israeli thinking, and his exploitation and deepening of it, was a brilliant act of strategic deception on his part. It has earned him a secure place in the heroes’ pantheon of those committed to destroying Israel and replacing it with an Islamic state, and their many supporters and dupes in the West.
Israel’s faulty analysis of Hamas enabled him to rise high. Hamas’s similarly flawed understanding of Israel ultimately destroyed him.
But the trajectory of events since 7 October show that Sinwar too was guilty of a basic misunderstanding of the nature of his enemy.
Fundamental to the strategy of the Iran-led ‘Mehwar al Muqawama’ (Axis of Resistance), of which Sinwar was a faithful and committed servant, is the notion that Israeli society suffers from a fundamental weakness, an absence of a deep commitment on the part of its citizens to its own survival. The reason for this perceived weakness is variously located in a perceived ‘inauthenticity’ of Israeli society deriving from the recent immigrant origins of most of Israel’s Jewish citizens, or, conversely, in a view of the Jews deriving from Islamic history, according to which they are a cowardly, non-martial people concerned with material advancement.
This conception explains the belief on the part of Sinwar and his ilk that Israel can be destroyed by a slow, long and persistent asymmetrical war against it. It also explains the Hamas leader’s evident belief that Israel would not dare to launch a ground operation to destroy his and his friends’ area of control, or would prove unable to sustain such an operation in the face of losses, or would be diverted from its objectives by Hamas’s possession of and threat to hostages.
As it turns out, Sinwar and Hamas’s ‘conception’ of Israeli society was mistaken. The IDF has moved forward relentlessly in Gaza, despite considerable losses in the early stages of its campaign. Israeli society, in a state of controlled grief and cold anger since 7 October, has remained committed to the war effort. Sinwar’s own death, and the defeat of his movement in Gaza, show the extent to which the conception under which he and his friends laboured is wrong.
Will Sinwar’s successors alter their basic (mis)conception of Israel after his death? Unlikely. The ‘Axis of Resistance’ did not come up with this underestimation of its enemy. They inherited it from earlier Arab and Palestinian opponents of Israel. It appears to be a perennial feature of a certain strand of thinking in the Middle East. Will Israel henceforth be immune to over-confidence and superficial analysis of its enemies’ motivations?
As an Israeli citizen, I’d like to think so. I wouldn’t bank on it. But these twin misconceptions were fundamental to the career of the Khan Yunis jihadist that ended in the ruins of Rafah this week, brought to its close by a tank shell fired by a 19-year-old soldier from the IDF’s Armoured Corps training school at Shizafon. Israel’s faulty analysis of Hamas enabled him to rise high. Hamas’s similarly flawed understanding of Israel ultimately destroyed him.
