Wounded, alone and in a ruined building: This is how Israel killed the head of Hamas. international

Israel has twice executed Yahia Sinwar, the leader of Hamas and accused of carrying out the October 7, 2023 massacre. On the one hand, there is their physical extermination, which occurred this Wednesday during a military operation in a building in southern Gaza. On the other hand, symbolic death, which is accompanied by the exhibition and dissemination of images of the inert body amid the debris of the man most wanted by the Israeli government and who is considered the mastermind of the worst attack in the country’s history. , approximately 1,200 dead. There is considerable contradiction in the cases of other enemies eliminated by Israel in this war, for whom no photographs have been released. Sinwar’s remains have been transferred to Israel, where they are in a cold storage room, but for many Palestinians he is already a martyr to the cause who did not surrender to Israeli occupation troops.

“We identified him as a terrorist inside a building. We fired at the building and entered inside to search. We found him with a vest, a gun and 40,000 shekels. He was running, he was trying to escape and our soldiers killed him,” military spokesman Daniel Hagari said of the operation, implying that troops were not specifically pursuing Sinwar at the time. . However, Israel had deployed two teams of agents to monitor enemy leaders in Gaza. According to the local press, one of them was working with complete dedication to capture or eliminate Sinwar.

Before this war, Israel had never succeeded in destroying an enemy with such force. There were no photographs following the death of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah; Nor of Hashem Saffieddin, whom he named as his successor; Nor of Sinwar’s predecessor Ismail Haniya; Neither was Mohammed Deif, the military chief of Hamas in Gaza, whose death the fundamentalist group denies, all of whom were killed by the bomb.

Israel has fully documented its occupation of Sinwar through its forces on the ground. And they have undertaken to spread the photographs as the seeds of victory in a war whose end is still in sight. Like the video recorded from a drone shortly before his death. In the recording, a man is seen alone and masked, sitting on a chair in a room filled with dust, chaos and destruction. With his right hand seriously injured, he can barely walk and the only gesture he makes is to throw a ribbon at the device in front of him with his left hand. It cuts to the video in what Israeli officials claim are the Hamas leader’s last moments alive.

According to the official version of the operation, the Hamas leader was accompanied by two people who became separated from him in the middle of the attack and died in another building.

The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) confirmed the death of its leader in a video statement this Friday. He died “in battle”, according to Jalil Haya, the hardline group’s top political official – and whom some voices point to as a potential new leader. He said that Israeli hostages would not be released until the war ended. This has dimmed hopes that the death of the Islamic leader might make it easier for the kidnapped to return home.

In an almost celebratory tone, analyzes in the Israeli press read that Sinwar died “like a dog”, and compared his end to that of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who was executed by a mob in 2011. Was. Ben Caspit describes in diary that he was found hidden in a drainpipe MaarivThose images had a great impact. From what has now been seen of Sinwar’s body, every detail has been examined, from the makeshift tourniquet placed on the body’s right arm to the watch or any property in his possession.

Furthermore, the wide dissemination of photographs of the body has been reinforced by a video recorded with a military drone, which Israel claims shows his last moments of life. Another video shows soldiers searching their pockets. It was he who sent the first evidence from the body for analysis to confirm Sinwar’s identity.

After the operation in Rafah (southern Gaza), the investigation was launched rapidly as the army realized that the body of the “terrorist” they had killed was “very similar to Sinwar’s body,” said sources at the National Institute. of Forensic Medicine of Israel. One of its officials told about the procedure done after the attack on Wednesday. First, they sent photographs of the teeth to volunteer police dentists, who found that they bore a strong resemblance to those of the Hamas leader. The fingerprints were then studied. Finally, a biological sample was sent to the National Institute of Forensic Medicine, where they confirmed through DNA that it was Sinwar, performing tomography late at night, before recovering his body. The forensic source concludes, “Both preliminary and final studies confirmed that it was 100% cinnabar.”

Forensic analysis shows that the body is that of a man who was not particularly exposed to the vicissitudes of war. His physical condition had endured long periods of hiding in the network of tunnels built by Hamas in the Gaza underground. “Sinwar was not very thin, he seemed to have eaten well and his general condition was good. The results indicate that the Hamas leader was shot in the head and other parts of the body,” an official told Kan public radio.

Due to the vagaries of the calendar, the Hamas leader died when Israel was celebrating Sukkot, a very popular religious holiday. Last year, the country was also commemorating the October 7 attack for which Sinwar is believed to be primarily responsible and which claimed the lives of nearly 1,200 people.

“It is good that the army killed him. It is good that the hostages were not injured (…) It is good that there were no injured soldiers,” Nahum Barania celebrated in his commentary in the newspaper Yediot AhronothThe analyst, following the general trend, takes the opportunity to remember that Sinwar’s disappearance should pave the way for diplomatic means to free a hundred captives. However, given the new situation, some questions arise: Does Israel currently have negotiators in Hamas? Are there any orders for the hostage-takers to retaliate by harming hostages who are still alive?