On Oct. 16, 2024, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, 61, was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers in the city of Rafah, located in southern Gaza. The State of Israel previously designated Sinwar as the “mastermind” behind the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, making him a high-priority military target.
Footage released by the Israel Defense Forces depicted a wounded Sinwar sitting in a chair shortly before his death, defiantly throwing a stick at the drone taking the footage. Israeli commentators attempted to use the footage to label Sinwar as a “coward;” supporters of Sinwar, however, saw his death as symbolic of his bravery and heroism, pointing to the Palestinian keffiyeh and combat attire he is shown wearing in the footage.
International responses to Sinwar’s death have varied, with some nations seeing it as a victory and others as a loss. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, for instance, labeled Sinwar a “vicious and unrepentant terrorist” in an Oct. 17 press statement, claiming that “[t]he world is a better place with him gone.” Many Western nations like Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France shared similar sentiments.
Other political leaders like Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei stated that Sinwar was a “shining face of resistance and struggle,” praising him for “[standing] against the oppressive and aggressive enemy” (presumably the State of Israel). Many Eastern nations such as Afghanistan, Malaysia, and Turkey also lamented the killing of Yahya Sinwar.
Such a stark difference of opinion about Sinwar reflects a larger division in international perspectives regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To some, Sinwar is a terrorist that massacred Israeli civilians; to others, he is a martyr of Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation. Sinwar’s controversial status will likely be debated upon and embedded in his legacy for years to come.
Sinwar was born in the Khan Younis refugee camp to parents displaced by Zionists from the village of al-Majdal (now Ashkelon, Israel) during the 1948 Nakba. His circumstances likely motivated his anti-occupation activism (for which he was detained) during his education at the Islamic University of Gaza in the early 1980s. After his university years, Sinwar helped found a youth organization named Majd that exposed Palestinian informants of Israel, which would later become Hamas’s security wing.
After his conviction in 1988 for allegedly killing two Israeli soldiers and four suspected Palestinian collaborators, Sinwar served twenty-two years in prison, being released in 2011 as part of a prisoner exchange. However, Sinwar did not see imprisonment as an impediment; he educated himself on the Hebrew language during his sentence to communicate with Israeli society. Sinwar also became a leader among his prisonmates, known for his negotiation skills with prison officials.
After his release, Sinwar quickly ascended Hamas leadership, serving the Hamas politburo starting in 2013 and finally becoming the leader of Hamas in 2017. Under Sinwar, Hamas repaired its foreign relationships with Arab powers such as Egypt and secured military support from Iran. Though Sinwar initially supported peaceful resistance, the threat of Israel’s normalization in the Middle East and the increasingly encroaching occupation pushed him in a more violent direction.Regardless of Sinwar’s perceived morality, his leadership was a significant source of stability for Hamas. The de facto government of the Gaza Strip felt a similar blow with the assassination of Hamas Political Bureau chairman Ismail Haniyeh in July 2024 during a diplomatic visit to Tehran, Iran. Sinwar’s death marks a significant loss for Palestinian resistance as Hamas searches for a new leader to fill his shoes.