The Israeli military says it is investigating whether it has killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar – seen as the mastermind of the 7 October attack and Israel’s most wanted man – in Gaza.
The Israeli military said that it was checking the possibility that Sinwar is dead following a recent ground operation that it said had killed three. “At this stage, the identity of the terrorists cannot be confirmed,” it said in a statement.
The military said there were no signs that hostages had been present in the building where the three were killed. There had been reports from the Israeli army that Sinwar had been hiding among hostages in tunnels under Gaza.
The last known footage of Sinwar shows a stooped man walking through a tunnel beneath Gaza accompanied by his wife and children. The video was retrieved by Israeli soldiers during a raid on Gaza earlier this year but is thought to date to the days immediately after the 7 October attack.
Sinwar, along with Mohammed Deif, the head of Hamas’ armed wing, is believed to have engineered the act of terror inside Israel on 7 October. Deif was killed in an airstrike on Gaza in July. The 7 October attack killed around 1,200 Israelis, while another 251 people were taken hostage. Israel’s retaliatory war inside Gaza from land and air has killed 42,000 Palestinians, according to health authorities in Gaza.
Sinwar was chosen as the group’s top leader following the assassination of Ismael Haniyeh in July in an apparent Israeli strike in the Iranian capital Tehran. He has proven to be Israel’s hardest target and previous speculation about Sinwar’s death has proved to be inaccurate.
Israeli outlet Channel 12 reported that the incident in question took place on Wednesday in the southern city of Rafah and that the Israeli troops operating in the area did not know that Sinwar was there. Troops spotted several fighters enter a building and a strike was ordered against it, which collapsed the structure.
Only after Israeli soldiers arrived to inspect the damage did they realise that one of the bodies strongly resembled Sinwar, Chennel 12 said. Israel’s Army Eadio said visual evidence suggested it was likely that one of the men was Sinwar and DNA tests were being conducted. Israel has samples of Sinwar’s DNA from a period in an Israeli jail.
Sinwar was born in 1962 in a refugee camp in the Gaza town of Khan Younis. Sinwar was an early member of Hamas, which was formed in 1987. He eventually led the group’s security arm, which worked to purge it of spies for Israel.
Israel arrested him in the late 1980s and he admitted to killing 12 people, a role that earned him the nickname “The Butcher of Khan Younis.” He was sentenced to four life terms for offenses that included the killing of two Israeli soldiers.
Sinwar was released from prison in 2011 by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as part of an exchange for an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, captured by Hamas in a cross-border raid. He quickly rose to head of Hamas in Gaza, effectively putting him in control of the territory, and he worked with Haniyeh to align the group with Iran and its proxies around the Middle East.
In recent months, Israel has killed several commanders of Hamas in Gaza as well as senior figures of Hezbollah in Lebanon – including its veteran leader Hassan Nasrallah – as it has intensified strikes, particularly against Hezbollah in Lebanon, across Israel’s northern border. Israel has also launched a ground invasion into southern Lebanon in tandem with the increased strikes. Hezbollah and Israel had started trading near-daily cross-border fire in the wake of Israel launching its war in Gaza.
The Israeli military said on Thursday that over the past 24 hours it had killed 45 Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon, including a battalion commander, and seized many weapons. Israeli operations in Lebanon have killed at least 2,350 people over the last year, according to the health ministry, and more than 1.2 million people have been displaced. Around 50 Israelis, both soldiers and civilians, have been killed in the same period, according to Israel.
The Israeli military has also issued evacuation warnings for residents of the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon focusing on three buildings in Tamnine town, and Saraain El Tahta and Sefri villages where it said Hezbollah maintained facilities.
“For your safety and the safety of your family, you must evacuate this building and the surrounding buildings immediately and stay at least 500 meters away from them,” military spokesperson Avichay Adraee posted on X.
Iran’s allies in its so-called “axis of resistance” – Hezbollah, Hamas, Yemen’s Houthis, and armed groups in Iraq – have carried out attacks in the region in support of the Palestinians in Gaza.
If Sinwar’s death is confirmed it will dial up tensions in the Middle East where fears of a wider Middle East conflict have grown as Israel plans its response to the attack containing 180 ballistic missiles carried out by Iran in response to Israel’s intensified strikes on its proxies.
The commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards warned Israel earlier on Thursday against attacking Iran. “We tell you [Israel] that if you commit any aggression against any point we will painfully attack the same point of yours,” Hossein Salami said in a televised speech, adding that Iran can penetrate Israel’s defences, which knocked the majority of Iran’s missiles out of the sky, with help from the US and other allies.
There has been speculation that Israel could strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, as it has long threatened to do and other options include attacks on its vital oil sites.
It comes as at least 28 Palestinians including children were killed in an Israeli strike on a shelter in the northern Gaza Strip, a Gaza health ministry official said. Dozens of people were also injured in the strike, health ministry official Medhat Abbas told Reuters, as Israel’s bloody assault on northern Gaza continues. The Hamas-run Gaza government media office put the number of wounded at 160.
The Israeli military said dozens of militants were present at the strike, claiming it had carried out a precise strike on Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters inside the compound.
Tanks were sent by the Israeli military into Jabalia in the north, where United Nations officials expressed concern over shortages of food and medicine.
It comes as a report by the International Labour Organisation revealed unemployment in Gaza hit nearly 80 per cent since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, with almost the entire 2.3 million population forced into poverty.
Referring to both Gaza and the West Bank, the ILO said the conflict had caused “unprecedented and wide-ranging devastation on the labour market and the wider economy across the Occupied Palestinian Territory”.
Gaza’s economic output has also shrunk by 85 per cent since the war began.
Elsewhere, Syrian state media reported that Israel had struck Syria’s port city of Latakia early on Thursday, while US B-2 stealth bombers have been used against the Houthis for the first time in a move that also marks a message to Tehran.
It is believed to be the first time the B-2 has been used in a combat mission since 2017. In announcing the strikes against the Houthis, who have been attacking ships in the Red Sea, the US defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, made a point of issuing a warning that there will be no place that Washington cannot reach
“This was a unique demonstration of the United States’ ability to target facilities that our adversaries seek to keep out of reach, no matter how deeply buried underground, hardened or fortified,” Austin said.
The “hardened” facilities contained weapon components which the Houthis have used to “target civilian and military vessels throughout the region,” Mr Austin said, but it is not yet clear how much damage has been caused.
Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report
