Yahya Sinwar’s Death Was Preordained
4 min read
In 2008, Yahya Sinwar—then an inmate in Israel’s Eshel Prison—developed a brain tumor. An Israeli surgeon operated on his head and saved his life. Today, Israel announced that one of its snipers had done the opposite. Photos of the Hamas leader’s body, half-sunk in rubble and dust in Rafah, show a massive head wound. Sinwar’s killing ends a one-year manhunt but not the invasion that his decision to attack and kidnap Israeli civilians last year all but guaranteed.
Few world leaders have spent as much time as Sinwar contemplating the manner and meaning of their death. During his 22-year stay in prison, he wrote a novel, The Thorn and the Carnation, in which Palestinians die gloriously, with poetry on their lips. The novel’s theme is martyrdom, and Sinwar seems to have lived so as to make his own violent death predictable. The valedictory poem of one of Sinwar’s fictional martyrs counsels stoicism: One need not fear death, because on the day it will come, it will come, “decreed by destiny.” One should not fight what is preordained. “From what is fated, no cautious person can escape.”
Sinwar was rumored to have linked his destiny to that of some of the 100 or so remaining Israeli hostages, by surrounding himself with them in case of attack. Israel says no hostages died in the operation, but tens of thousands of equally blameless Gazans have found their fates forcibly intertwined with Sinwar’s. Hamas had been lobbing rockets into Israel for years, and Israel had reckoned that it could tolerate them, especially if it could steadily upgrade its relations with the broader Arab world in the meantime. Sinwar’s October 7 attack seems to have had as its only strategic goal the disruption of that status quo. And by committing flagrant war crimes against vulnerable people, he handed Israel—in a way that a few piddly rocket attacks never would—justification for a war of elimination against Hamas. The very act of having kept the hostages, rather than releasing them immediately, constituted a permanent license for Israel to scour and destroy Gaza in search of its citizens. His insistence that Hamas did nothing wrong on October 7, and would do it again, and harder, if given the chance, removed any remaining possibility that Israel would seek a solution that would spare Gazans from the total destruction of their land.
A common Israeli political frustration is that the country is led by Benjamin Netanyahu, whose wartime decisions are cynical and calculated for personal and political benefit. Palestinians have suffered an even worse tragedy, to be led by someone with no sense of urgency to conclude suffering, because of his belief that violent death is not only preordained but noble. (I wonder whether Sinwar’s long prison sentence, which reportedly included four years of solitary confinement, warped his sense of time and gave him an unhealthy patience, whereas a normal person would desperately seek an immediate way forward, however imperfect.)
What a disaster, to have someone so fatalistic making urgent decisions! Rounds of pointless negotiations between Israel and Hamas were prolonged, then ended inconclusively, because Hamas needed to consult Sinwar, its commander in Gaza, and he was hard to reach in his tunnels. This summer, after Israel assassinated Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, Sinwar was announced as the group’s new top political leader, despite the obvious difficulty of having a chairman so avidly hunted that for him to even step outside might be enough to invite an Israeli missile strike. But the truth is that Sinwar, as the commander in Gaza, already had sole executive authority over the territory, and any other purported leader of Hamas would have had to ask his permission to make important decisions anyway. So everyone waited on Sinwar, who waited for death and was blasé about its timing. That preference fit comfortably with the preference of some Israelis to keep fighting until Hamas is eliminated completely—even at the cost of many Palestinian lives, and probably hostages’ lives as well.
Sinwar’s death will stiffen the group’s rhetoric but expand certain options. By not making any deals and instead fighting until his own death, Sinwar showed that he never softened the resolve he exhibited early in the war. With that point proved, his successors will have less need to belabor it. And Israel will have an opening to say that it has accomplished a core objective. It has thus far avoided any serious discussion of what Gaza might look like after the war, and who might step up to secure and rebuild it. Sinwar’s killing provides the first milestone in a long while for Israel to pause and consider a realistic next step.
When the Islamic State lost most of its territory, many analysts suggested, hopefully, that its drubbing would be a lesson to other jihadists: Any future attempt to build a terror-state would end in that state’s annihilation. But those analysts failed to appreciate what optimists jihadists can be. Extreme violence may have failed, but it produced more dramatic results than anything else. The death of Sinwar and the utter destruction of Gaza could serve to remind Palestinians that enthusiastically murdering Israelis will have unacceptably painful consequences for Palestinians too. But Sinwar’s example will also show future generations of martyrdom-seekers that they can, all by themselves, grab their cause’s helm and steer it toward greater violence. And when they do that, no one will be able to pay attention to much else. This lesson could be Sinwar’s most lasting legacy.
