The Israeli military has released drone footage it says shows Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s final moments: alone in a ruined apartment in Gaza, walls destroyed by bombing, sitting hunched over in a dust-covered chair , his head and face covered with dust. a kufiya.
With his right arm badly injured, the video shows Sinwar throwing a stick above his head towards the approaching drone. The Guardian has not independently verified the images.
At the time the footage was released, Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari said Sinwar had only been identified as a fighter. The army then fired another projectile at the building, causing it to collapse and killing him, said Hagari, who said Sinwar was found with a bulletproof vest, grenades and 40,000 shekels ($10,707) .
According to the Jerusalem Post, Hagari told reporters: “Sinwar fled alone to one of the buildings. Our forces used a drone to scan the area, as shown in the images I present. Sinwar, injured in the hand by gunfire, can be seen here with his face covered, in his final moments, throwing a wooden plank at the drone. “He tried to escape and our forces eliminated him.”
Hamas confirmed Sinwar’s killing.
Photos circulating online on Thursday showed the body of a man resembling Sinwar with an open wound on his head, dressed in a military-style vest, half-buried in the rubble of a destroyed building.
According to Israeli authorities, Sinwar was found on Wednesday by infantry soldiers searching an area of Tal El Sultan, southern Gaza, where they believed senior Hamas officials were located.
Troops spotted three suspected militants moving between buildings and opened fire, sparking a shootout during which Sinwar fled into a ruined building.
In the final months of his life, Sinwar, the principal architect of the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that was responded to by the Israeli genocide in Gaza, appears to have stopped using telephones and other communications equipment that would have enabled to the powerful Israeli intelligence services to find him.
Israeli officials said they believed he was hiding in one of the vast networks of tunnels dug by Hamas under Gaza over the past two decades, but as Israeli troops have discovered more and more, even the tunnels did not guarantee that he would escape to be captured.
Intelligence had been searching for Sinwar for months and had gradually restricted the area in which he could operate, the military said. Dental records, fingerprints and DNA testing provided definitive confirmation of Sinwar’s death.
