Killing Sinwar: A chance encounter after a yearlong manhunt for the head of Hamas

Elbahrain.net It was around 5:30 in the morning on Thursday in Washington, DC, when senior US officials first got word — and photographs — from their Israeli counterparts: Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar might be dead.

For more than a year since Hamas attacked Israel last October 7, Israeli forces — with some quiet help from the United States — had been hunting the mastermind behind that day.

More than once, they had been close, pushing the Hamas chief from one underground hiding place to the next. But Sinwar had moved like a ghost in the endless warren of tunnels dug beneath the streets of Gaza, rarely coming above ground and communicating only through courier to avoid detection by electronic surveillance.

In the end, it was only by pure accident that a group of Israeli soldiers stumbled on Israel’s most wanted man.

Infantry soldiers from the IDF’s Bislach Brigade, a unit that normally trains future commanders, had been tracking several men among the ruins in southern Gaza, pulverized by Israel’s punishing bombing campaign. Gunfire broke out. The Israelis fired back from a tank and sent a drone swooping into one of the hollowed-out buildings.

It was only after the exchange of fire had ended and troops returned the following morning to inspect the rubble that they realized one of the bodies was Sinwar.

His death marks the end of a yearlong manhunt that had consumed Israeli and US intelligence services — and dominated discussions about what it would take to end the war. The CIA had set up a specific task force to track Sinwar; and after October 7, the US broadly surged intelligence assets to the region to gather information on Hamas and its leader.

Yet, multiple US officials told CNN, the moment of his death came as a total surprise.

Israeli and US officials often had some sense of the general area where Sinwar was hiding over the long months. But the elusive Hamas leader moved constantly and made pinpointing his location extremely difficult.

He eschewed cell phones and other electronic communications entirely, instead sending written notes to convey his directions both to military commanders inside Gaza and to Hamas officials in Doha who were acting as his representatives in negotiations over a possible ceasefire. Interlocutors would sometimes have to wait days or weeks for feedback from Sinwar to give couriers time to relay written messages back and forth.

Sinwar had not appeared publicly since October 7. His only known direct communication with the outside world was through several letters, most recently last month when he wrote to Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah. The Lebanese militant group said he had written to Nasrallah reaffirming his commitment to fighting Israel and supporting the Iran-backed alliance of regional militants known as the “Axis of Resistance.”

For so long, Sinwar had been known to be meticulously careful, even paranoid, about his personal security. It’s unclear what drew him above ground on Wednesday — a fateful decision that made him vulnerable.

“These guys come out of hiding and can never stay comfortable,” one US official said.

A year of near misses
Over and over, it seemed that the IDF was always just a step behind Sinwar.

On at least three separate occasions in 2024, Israeli Defense Forces were able to push into tunnels where Sinwar had only just been.

In January, according to a top IDF commander, DNA evidence helped Israel confirm that he had been hiding in a tunnel beneath Khan Younis in early October 2023. CNN was unable to independently confirm that analysis.