Israel says that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas and alleged mastermind of the October 7 attacks, has been killed in Gaza.
Israeli forces killed three men while conducting a routine search for Hamas militants in Rafah. Sinwar was one of the three, killed after they split up in a bid to evade capture, and his body was identified by DNA data.
A top Hamas official confirmed the death but insisted the group would fight on.
Who exactly was Sinwar?
Who was Yahya Sinwar?
Sinwar was born in 1962 in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza. His family were among the many Palestinians driven out of their homes in present-day Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that followed the Jewish state’s establishment.
After studying at school and university in Gaza, he was arrested in 1982 for subversive activities and developed contacts in the Palestinian resistance when he spent several months in jail on the West Bank.
When Hamas split from the Muslim Brotherhood in 1987, the radical group’s founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin appointed Sinwar the head of a new intelligence agency tasked with rooting out Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israeli security forces.
For that work, Sinwar became known as “the Butcher of Khan Younis”. In 1989, he was handed four life sentences by an Israeli court for the murder of four Palestinians accused of collaboration, including one whom he strangled with his bare hands.
Yahya Sinwar’s time in prison
Sinwar was a feared and respected figure among Palestinian inmates, who elected him one of their leaders in jail. He was well-known for preparing kunafa, a dessert made of shredded bread filled with cheese, for other prisoners.
However, he also continued his work to root out collaborators from behind bars. He spent his time as well on intensive study of Jewish history, Israeli society and Hebrew, and wrote a novel which was confiscated by Israeli guards.
Israeli doctors operated to remove a life-threatening tumour from his brain in 2004.
In 2011, he was freed together with more than 1,000 other inmates by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in return for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier taken prisoner by Hamas during a cross-border operation.
The decision would return to haunt Netanyahu as Sinwar took on more influential roles in Hamas outside of prison, culminating in the October 7 attacks.
Leading Hamas
Following his release, Sinwar worked closely with the Qassam Brigades, Hamas's military arm, and the political leadership of the organisation.
He was suspected of being behind the grisly 2016 murder of Mahmoud Ishtewi, a senior Hamas commander, during an internal power struggle.
He was chosen to lead the Hamas political department in Gaza in 2017, working with exiled political chief Ismail Haniyeh to entrench the group’s alliance with Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
He also worked to build up the military capability of Hamas. When Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran in July, Sinwar stepped up to take overall control of Hamas.
October 7 attacks
According to Israeli officials, Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, the commander of the Qassam Brigades, and Deif's deputy, Marwan Issa, were among the masterminds of the attack on October 7.
Afterwards, Sinwar fled into the tunnel system Hamas had constructed beneath Gaza, with his family.
He remained elusive until the dramatic announcement that he had been killed, not in a special raid by Israeli special forces, but by chance in an encounter with the Israeli foot patrol.
Drone footage released by Israel showed him hunched over, alone, in an arm-chair on the first floor of a ruined building. He tried to swat the drone away with a stick before dying of gunshot wounds inflicted by the soldiers, a fortnight before he would have turned 62.
