Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday that a recent airstrike killed Mohammed Sinwar, Hamas’ elusive de facto leader in Gaza, the latest in a string of assassinations that have dealt a serious blow to the group’s top brass but are yet to break its grip on power.
Sinwar is the brother of former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who was killed by the Israeli military in southern Gaza in October.
Netanyahu made the announcement during a speech in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, as the country marked 600 days since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023.
“We changed the face of the Middle East, we pushed the terrorists from our territories, we entered the Gaza Strip with force, we eliminated tens of thousands of terrorists, we eliminated (Mohammad) Deif, (Ismail) Haniyeh, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Sinwar,” he told lawmakers.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) carried out a massive strike on the European Hospital in Khan Younis on May 13 — a day after Hamas released Israeli-American soldier Edan Alexander.
The strike killed several dozen people and wounded dozens more, the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza said at the time.
Hamas had rejected claims about Sinwar’s death at the time, saying in a statement that only it is “authorized to confirm or deny what is published.”
Sinwar’s death would deprive Hamas of an able and determined commander. But many analysts say it won’t bring the end of the conflict any closer. It may even complicate negotiations with Israel if a new leader doesn’t emerge and Hamas mediators are left without a Hamas interlocutor inside Gaza.
Israeli officials considered Mohammed Sinwar just as hardline as his brother, Yahya, but much more experienced militarily. According to the IDF, he commanded the group’s Khan Younis Brigade until 2016.
Since the start of the war, he has remained largely hidden, along with many of Hamas’ senior leaders in Gaza. In December 2023, the IDF released video of what it said was Mohammed Sinwar driving through a tunnel in Gaza. In February 2024, the IDF said it had located his office in western Khan Younis.
Netanyahu has vowed to continue the war until Israel has destroyed Hamas’ military capacity and ability to govern. To that end, Israel has gone after Hamas’ top leaders in Gaza, and Sinwar is the latest target.
In July, the IDF killed the group’s military leader, Mohammed Deif, in a strike on an Israeli-designated humanitarian zone in southern Gaza. Two weeks later, Israel assassinated Hamas’ political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. Then, in October, Israeli forces killed Yahya Sinwar in Rafah in southern Gaza. His death left his younger brother, Mohammed, as the de facto leader of Hamas in Gaza, which put him squarely in Israel’s crosshairs.
Ever since his brother’s death, Sinwar had been pre-eminent among the leaders of Hamas’ military wing inside Gaza. He was intimately involved in the planning for Hamas’ October 7 attacks, which saw more than 1,200 people in Israel killed and another roughly 250 taken hostage. A video of him in the tunnels purportedly leading towards Israeli territory surfaced several weeks after the attacks.
By most accounts, Sinwar was ruthlessly determined to keep up the fight, despite the loss of thousands of fighters in Hamas military wing and the deepening suffering of Gaza’s civilians, as well as sporadic street protests in Gaza against Hamas.
Some commentators believe that Mohammed Sinwar lacked the broader authority enjoyed by Yahya. Haaretz security analyst Amos Harel writes that he shared “leadership responsibilities in Gaza with Az al-Din al-Haddad, a commander whose power base lies in the north of the Strip.”
Impact on ceasefire negotiations
Muhammad Shehada at the European Council on Foreign Relations says his death would complicate the negotiation process as Hamas reorganizes a shrinking leadership within Gaza. Without those leaders, he says, Hamas becomes more de-centralized and a ceasefire is more difficult to enforce.
Avi Issacharoff, a commentator with media outlet Ynet, says if Sinwar is dead “it may open the door for more pragmatic voices within Hamas’ leadership, such as Khalil al-Hayya and others currently involved in negotiations with Qatar and the Americans.”
The balance between that leadership and its negotiators abroad has always been hard to assess, but Shehada says the Hamas negotiators “perfectly represent the movement” and had already made countless concessions on a much-diminished post-conflict role, including allowing an international peacekeeping force and giving up governance.
“They are at their most lenient now” in the face of an Israeli government that is not prepared to negotiate beyond a temporary ceasefire, says Shehada.
There is plentiful evidence that Mohammed Sinwar was as hardline as his brother, perhaps even more so.
In a rare interview with Al Jazeera in 2021, Sinwar said: “We know how to identify the pain points of the occupation, how to pressure it.” He was speaking after Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) launched more than 4,000 rockets toward Israel.
Speaking in silhouette, Sinwar spoke of expanding Hamas’ ambitions.
“Tel Aviv has been placed on the table since the first day of the battle… Striking Tel Aviv is easier than taking a sip of water.”
By the time he was killed he had accumulated 30 years of military experience.
Living in the shadows
Sinwar was born in the Khan Younis refugee camp in 1975 and was first arrested for militant activities as a teenager. He became the leader of Hamas’ Khan Younis brigade and is said to have played a key role in the Hamas operation that captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2006, according to the Counter Extremism Project, and in insisting on his brother’s release from an Israeli prison in return for Shalit’s freedom.
Muhammad Shehada says Sinwar lived more in the shadows than his brother and others in Hamas’ leadership and had a more rigid security environment, almost to the point of paranoia.
“After an assassination attempt in 2003 he vanished, and did not take a public role in his father’s funeral” in 2022, according to Michael Barak, head of the Global Jihad Research Program at the International Institute for Counter Terrorism in Israel.
The evidence of the past few months suggests he was an able tactician. Time and again, the Israeli military had to return to areas of Gaza it had previously scoured for Hamas fighters.
While Hamas has lost as many as 20,000 fighters, according to an assessment by the Israeli military in January, it has maintained its presence in many parts of Gaza, even occasionally firing rockets towards Israel. In a report last month, the International Crisis Group think tank said that despite those losses, Hamas had managed to recruit thousands more fighters.
However, Shahada says that the Israeli campaign has seriously degraded Hamas and it is now more of a guerrilla group than a threat to its neighbor. Killing Sinwar won’t change that, he says.
Despite Sinwar’s death, Yaakov Amidror, a former National Security Advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said: “It is likely that we will need to continue fighting for at least a year, in order to clean the Strip of remnants of Hamas rule, terrorists, and infrastructure.” Only then, Amidror told the Jewish News Syndicate, could a new form of government be introduced to Gaza.
Shehada believes that Israel’s attempt to kill Sinwar the day after it released US-Israeli hostage Edan Alexander will “make it harder for Hamas to trust anything the mediators or the US says….It’s the perfect signal that no amount of guarantees from the mediators will suffice to enforce a ceasefire even if one is reached.”
But what happens in Gaza next may depend as much as on the pressure being exerted by Washington on the Israeli government to end the conflict as on the leadership of Hamas.
Amos Harel at Haaretz believes that “whether he lives or dies is no longer the central question. The course of the war now hinges on a different factor entirely: what (US) President (Donald) Trump does next – and whether he succeeds in imposing his terms on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”