The hunt lasted a year, an eternity. Yahya Sinouar, mastermind of the October 7 attack, was eventually killed by the Israeli army, which revealed his death on Thursday, October 17. The Jewish State did not achieve this victory thanks to the radars that probed the underground of Gaza, hoping to locate the leader of the Islamist movement in the immense network of tunnels that he had helped to build. Nor was Israel’s public enemy number one eliminated in one of these commando operations, triggered on the basis of intelligence, which sometimes missed it by a hair’s breadth. The fugitive who was believed to be hiding in the underground bunkers, where he was supposed to keep a group of Israeli hostages around him used as human shields, died during an exchange of fire with an Israeli patrol in Rafah, in the south of the country. enclave.
The soldiers did not know that they were shooting at the man most persecuted by their country. On Thursday night, Israeli authorities released a video purportedly showing Yahya Sinouar’s final moments, filmed by a drone. We see an injured man sitting in an armchair in a ruined house. In one last burst, he throws a stick in the direction of the camera watching him. One shot from the army will blow everything up. Three bodies will be pulled from the rubble, including yours, which is partially recognizable. DNA analyzes and the impression of his teeth, preserved by the police from his long stay in Israeli prisons, allowed him to be formally identified. With Sinouar disappears the last member of the trio that caused the October 7 bloodbath and the devastating war that followed: Mohammed Deif, the head of Hamas’s military branch, was killed in an attack in July, and Marwan Issa, his Second, it was eliminated in March.
a year underground
Before this definitive exit to the surface, Yahya Sinouar would have spent a year underground, in its labyrinth of tunnels, communicating with the outside world through messengers, in particular to transmit his instructions regarding the ceasefire negotiations. conditioned the end of hostilities on a cross-release agreement between the Israeli hostages (of the initial 250, 101 remain, according to Israel, half of whom are dead) and the Palestinian prisoners, and on a complete withdrawal of the Israeli army from Gaza. . Thus he hoped to emerge victorious from the ruins of the coastal strip.
The ranks of his couriers, some of whom had been close to him since his two decades in prison, had thinned as they were eliminated by the Israeli army. Lately, Yahya Sinouar had stopped sending instructions, giving rise to the hypothesis that he could have been killed by the army without their knowledge, during a bombing in Gaza.
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