Israel has twice killed Yahia Sinwar, leader of Hamas and accused of orchestrating the massacre of October 7, 2023. On the one hand, there is his physical elimination, which occurred this Wednesday during a military operation in a building in southern Gaza. On the other hand, the symbolic death, which occurs with the exhibition and dissemination of images of the inert body, among rubble, of the man most wanted by the Government of Israel and considered the mastermind of the worst attack in the history of the country, with about 1,200 dead. There is a great contrast with the cases of other enemies eliminated by Israel in this war, of which no photos have been released. Sinwar’s remains have been transferred to Israel, where they remain in a cold storage room, but for many Palestinians he is already a martyr for the cause who did not surrender to the Israeli occupation troops.
“We identified him as a terrorist inside a building. We shot at the building and entered to conduct a search. We found him with a vest, a gun and 40,000 shekels. He was fleeing, he was trying to flee, and our troops killed him,” military spokesman Daniel Hagari explained about the operation, implying that the soldiers were not specifically pursuing Sinwar at that time. However, Israel had assigned two teams of agents to track enemy leaders in Gaza. One of them was operating with full dedication to capture or eliminate Sinwar, according to the local press.
Never before in this war had Israel managed to convey with such force the proof of the annihilation of an enemy. There were no photos after the death of Hasan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah; nor of Hashem Safieddine, whom they pointed out as his successor; nor of Ismail Haniya, Sinwar’s predecessor; nor the military chief of Hamas in Gaza, Mohamed Deif, whose death the fundamentalist group denies, all of them were hit by bombs.
Israel has thoroughly documented the capture of Sinwar through its military on the ground. And he has taken it upon himself to spread the photos as a seed of victory in a war whose end is not yet in sight. Like the video recorded with the drone shortly before his death. In the recording, a man appears alone and masked, sitting in an armchair in a room filled with dust, disorder and destruction. With his right arm seriously injured, he can barely move and the only gesture he makes is to throw a ribbon at the device in front of him with his left hand. This is how the video that captures what Israeli authorities claim are the last moments alive of the Hamas leader is cut.
According to the official version of the operation, the Hamas leader was accompanied by two men who separated from him in the middle of the attack and ended up dead in another building.
The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) confirmed this Friday the death of its leader in a video statement. He died “in combat,” according to Jalil Haya, the top political official of the fundamentalist group now – and who some voices point to as a possible new leader. He added that the Israeli hostages will not be released until the war ends. That lowers expectations that the end of the Islamist leader may facilitate the return home of the kidnapped.
In an almost festive tone, in the analyzes of the Israeli press it can be read that Sinwar died “like a dog”, and his end is compared to that of the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, executed at the hands of a mob that found him hiding. in a drainpipe, describes Ben Caspit in the diary Ma’ariv. Those images had a great impact. In what has now been seen of Sinwar’s body, every detail has been scrutinized, from the corpse’s improvised tourniquet on the body’s right arm, to the watch or the possessions it carried.
Furthermore, the wide dissemination of photos of the body has been reinforced by a video recorded with a military drone, of what Israel claims are his last moments of life. Another video shows soldiers searching their pockets. They were the ones who sent the first evidence from the body to be analyzed to confirm Sinwar’s identity.
After the operation in Rafah (southern Gaza), investigations were quickly launched because the military realized that the body of the “terrorist” they had killed “was very, very similar to Sinwar’s,” they explain to Morning Express. sources from the National Institute of Forensic Medicine of Israel. One of its officials recounts the process undertaken on Wednesday after the attack. First, they sent images of the teeth to volunteer police dentists, who noted that there was a strong resemblance to images of the Hamas leader. The fingerprints were then studied. Finally, a biological sample was sent to the National Institute of Forensic Medicine, where they confirmed through DNA that it was Sinwar before receiving his body, which was subjected to a tomography, late at night. “Both the preliminary and final studies confirmed that it was 100% Sinwar,” concludes that forensic source.
The forensic analysis reports the body of a person who had not suffered particularly the vicissitudes of the war. His physical condition had withstood well the long periods hidden in the network of tunnels built by Hamas in the underground of Gaza. “Sinwar was not too thin, he seemed to have eaten well and his general condition was good. The results indicated that the Hamas leader had been shot in the head and other parts of the body,” an official told Kan public radio.
Due to the vagaries of the calendar, the Hamas leader died while Israel was celebrating Sukkot, a very popular religious holiday. Last year, the country was also celebrating on October 7, the day of the attack for which Sinwar is considered primarily responsible and which cost the lives of some 1,200 people.
“It’s good that the army killed him. It is good that the hostages were not injured (…) It is good that there were no wounded soldiers,” Nahum Barnea celebrates in his comment in the newspaper Yediot Ahronoth. The analyst takes the opportunity, following the general trend, to remember that the disappearance of Sinwar must give way to diplomatic means to free the hundred captives. Some questions arise, however, given the new situation: Does Israel currently have interlocutors in Hamas? Is there any order for the captors to harm the hostages who are still alive in retaliation?