A group of Israeli hostages huddled in a Gaza tunnel days after being taken from their home on October 7, when the man who planned their kidnapping appeared in the darkness of the basement.
He had gray hair and beard, and his dark, dark-rimmed eyes stood out beneath thick black eyebrows. The face was familiar to them from thousands of TV shows and newspapers: Yahya Sinwar.
The Hamas leader in Gaza was the most feared man in Israel, even before ordering the October attack in which 1,200 people were killed – two-thirds of them civilians – and 250 were captured. hostages.
In fluent Hebrew, perfected over 22 years in an Israeli prison, Sinwar assured them that they were safe and would soon be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners. One of the hostages, Yocheved Lifshitz, an 85-year-old veteran peace activist from Kibbutz Nir Oz, had no time to express concern for his well-being and challenged the Hamas leader to his face.
“I asked him how he was not ashamed to do something like that to people who had supported peace all these years,” Lifshitz told the Davar newspaper after his release after 16 days in captivity. “He didn’t answer. “He remained silent.”
A little over a year after the October 7 attacks, Israel announced his death. With a whole team searching for Sinwar, the soldiers found his body. These soldiers were not in the area to carry out a targeted assassination, nor did they know Sinwar was present, Haaretz reports. Two Israeli sources informed CNN that Sinwar was killed during a routine military operation.
The hunt
A video recorded by Hamas security cameras around the same time as this October 10 meeting with the hostages and found by the Israeli military a few months later shows Sinwar following his wife and three children through a tunnel and disappearing into the darkness.
It was the last appearance of the man who started the war in Gaza. According to Gaza health authorities, more than 42,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed in a devastating Israeli response that has devastated much of the territory, driving 90 percent of the population from their homes and plunging 2.3 millions of people on the verge of starvation. Despite this, the main target of the Israeli bombing remained at large and apparently unharmed.
Throughout these months, the hunt for Sinwar has been a mix of advanced technology and brute force, with his pursuers willing to go to extremes, even causing an extremely high number of civilian casualties, to kill the leader of the Hamas and destroy Hamas. the tight circle that surrounds it.
The Hunters are a group of intelligence officers, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) special operations units, military engineers and surveillance experts under the umbrella of the Israel Security Agency, better known by its Hebrew initials or the acronym Shabak.
Personally and institutionally, this team seeks to atone for the security flaws that enabled the October 7 assault. But despite their motivation, they have so far been unable to find their prey.
“If you had told me at the start of the war that more than 11 months later I would still be alive, it would have seemed incredible to me,” said Michael Milshtein, former head of the Palestinian affairs section of the Israeli military intelligence (Aman). “But remember that Sinwar prepared for a decade for this offensive and that IDF intelligence was very surprised by the size and length of the tunnels under Gaza and their sophistication. »
The Israeli military estimates that there are 500 kilometers of tunnels under Gaza, an entire underground city. A second major challenge, according to at least some members of the defense, is that Sinwar likely surrounded himself with human shields.
Ram Ben-Barak, former deputy director of Mossad, said: “Because of the hostages, we are very careful in what we do. I think if there were no such restrictions, we would have found him more easily.
Whether or not Sinwar was surrounded by a ring of human shields, the possible presence of hostages did not prevent the Israeli army from dropping 900-kilogram high-powered bombs on suspected Hamas hideouts. Among its two main war goals, the Netanyahu government places the destruction of Hamas ahead of rescuing hostages.
There is no shortage of experts among the hunters of Sinwar. Despite the circumstances of Sinwar’s death, targeted killings have been a key tactic of the Israeli military since the establishment of the state. Since World War II, Israel has killed more people than any other country in the Western world.
Yahalom, a special section within the Corps of Combat Engineers, has more experience in tunnel warfare than any of its counterparts in Western armies, and has access to cutting-edge American-made ground-penetrating radar . The clandestine signals intelligence unit 8200 is a world leader in electronic warfare and has been spying on Hamas communications for decades.
The Shin Bet lost many of its sources in Gaza after Israel’s withdrawal from the territory in 2005, but worked hard to rebuild its network of informants after Israel launched its ground invasion last October, recruiting from the streams desperate Palestinians who fled the assault. .
Despite the capabilities of this task force, it only came close to trapping Sinwar once in a bunker beneath his hometown of Khan Yunis, in late January. Sinwar had left behind clothes and more than a million shekels (over £200,000) in bundles of cash. Some saw this as a sign of panic, although it was ultimately estimated that the Hamas leader had left days before Israeli forces stormed the bunker.
The hypothesis used by Sinwar’s trackers is that he long ago abandoned the use of electronic communication, very aware of the skills and technology his pursuers possess. Sinwar not only studied Hebrew in the Israeli prison, but also the habits and culture of his enemy.
“He really understands the basic instincts and deepest feelings of Israeli society,” said Milshtein, now at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University. “I’m pretty sure his every move is based on his understanding of Israel. »
Sinwar had continued to communicate with the outside world, although with apparent difficulty. Lengthy ceasefire negotiations in Cairo and Doha were often interrupted by messages being sent to and from the clandestine commander. It is quite possible that Sinwar used human messengers to stay in charge, drawn from a small and dwindling coterie of aides he trusted, starting with his brother Mohammed, a top military commander in Gaza.
The team pursuing Sinwar hoped that the need to maintain contact with the smugglers, to issue orders and control negotiations over the hostages, would lead to their downfall, just as a courier led American trackers for several years to Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad (Pakistan).
He is a messenger who is believed to have led Israeli fighters to their biggest scalp of the war so far. At 10:30 a.m. on July 13, Mohammed Deif, the veteran Hamas commander who had topped Israel’s most wanted list since 1995, emerged from hiding near a displaced persons camp in al-Mawasi to get some fresh air with a close lieutenant, Rafa’a Salameh. In an instant, both were killed by bombs dropped by Israeli fighters (according to the IDF version) alongside dozens of Palestinians. Hamas insists Deif is still alive, but has not been seen since.
Many members of Israeli security lamented what they saw as a missed historic opportunity in September 2003, when their planes were prepared to bomb a house where all Hamas leaders were meeting. After furious discussions within the military chain of command, the Air Force fired a precision missile at the so-called meeting room, instead of razing the entire building with a hail of bombs, out of fear civilian casualties. They entered the wrong room and the Hamas leaders survived.
By July this year, the likelihood of killing large numbers of civilians was no longer an obstacle. To attack Deif, the Air Force used 900 kilo bombs, the same ones that the Biden administration stopped sending in May due to their indiscriminate destructive force. Israel reportedly launched eight on July 13. 90 nearby Palestinians were killed and nearly 300 injured.
“It seems that the main source of the attack against Mohammed Deif, the one who actually gave the information on his location, was a human source: one of those messengers who go from a tunnel or a shelter to the other and transmit messages between one commander and another,” Milstein said.
Yossi Melman, co-author of Spies Against Armageddon and author of other books on Israeli intelligence, said Deif may have made a mistake that Sinwar was unlikely to repeat.
“Maybe Deif was more arrogant or maybe he thought because they had tried to kill him so many times, that maybe God was with him,” Melman says. “The Shabak and the army have been waiting for this opportunity. All these targeted killings are about waiting for a small mistake from the other party. But Sinwar is more cautious. “He is not a military commander who showed himself among his people.”
It was even said that it was possible that Sinwar was on the other side of the border, hidden in a tunnel on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border. But “staying in Gaza and fighting to the death is in their basic DNA. He would rather die in his bunker,” says Milshtein.
Sinwar’s death is undoubtedly being celebrated as a major military success by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which has made the destruction of Hamas’ “military and governance capabilities” a primary war objective. Another question is whether it would end the war.
“The situation will be much better, maybe for a few weeks,” Ben-Barak said. “Then another one will come. “This is an ideological war, not a war against Sinwar.”
“After almost 50 years of murder, we understand that this is a fundamental part of the game. Sometimes it is necessary to assassinate a very prominent leader. But when you start to think that this is going to change the rules of the game and that an ideological organization is going to collapse because one of its leaders is killed, that is a total mistake,” says Milshtein.
“If Sinwar is killed, there will be someone else… You can’t create a fantasy. “This will not end the war.”
This article was published on September 14, 2024 and was updated by elDiario.es.
Translation of Javier Biosca
