But Hamas has morphed into a potent guerrilla force, continuing to engage in fierce street battles with Israeli troops inside Gaza. It also still held 101 Israeli hostages – several dozen of whom were believed to be alive – and remained strong enough to “kill any substitute” in a postwar scenario, Amidror said.

“It’s not going to be the end of Hamas,” Mkhaimar Abusada, a political science professor at Al-Azhar University in Gaza, said of Sinwar’s death. Abusada fled Gaza last year and is now a visiting scholar at Northwestern University.

Israel assassinated the group’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and then-leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi in 2004, but those killings did not weaken Hamas, he said.

“Hamas, at the end of the day, look at themselves as a national liberation movement, that they are fighting against the Israeli occupation,” Abusada said. “And if one leader dies, another one will pick up the fight and continue. This is what has been going on for many years.”

Sinwar spent 22 years in Israeli jails before his release in a 2011 prisoner exchange for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. He built a reputation as an unyielding ideologue and a brutal enforcer of Hamas rule before becoming the group’s leader in Gaza in 2017.

There, he plotted the October 7, 2023, attack, a harrowing rampage across southern Israel that he hoped would ignite a regional war. While other Hamas leaders led comfortable lives abroad in Turkey, Lebanon and Qatar, Sinwar stayed in besieged Gaza and disappeared after October 7 into the vast network of tunnels Hamas had built underneath it.

For a year, as Israeli forces pummelled and then invaded the territory, displacing most of the population and causing acute hunger and a humanitarian crisis, Sinwar managed to survive and maintain his grip both on Hamas forces inside Gaza and its leadership abroad as they negotiated ceasefire talks, analysts said.

He consolidated control over the summer, rising to lead Hamas’ political bureau after the assassination of the group’s chairman and chief negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran.

But just two months later, his reign ended in a pile of rubble in Rafah in southern Gaza, his body caked in dust and his head mortally wounded after encountering Israeli forces, according to photos apparently taken by soldiers and circulated online. Later, Israeli authorities said DNA tests and dental records confirmed Sinwar was dead. Hamas did not respond to the reports.

The images posted online, in which Sinwar is wearing a tactical vest, could increase support for Hamas, allowing it to burnish his image as a fighter and martyr for their cause. Israel repeatedly sought to portray him as a cowardly leader who hid underground as Palestinians were killed.

The military released what it said was drone footage of some of Sinwar’s final moments: he is wounded, sitting in a chair in a destroyed home, his face hidden by a scarf. He stares down the drone as it approaches and throws a piece of wood at the unmanned aircraft.

“It marks a heroic end for a brave man, especially since he was martyred on the front lines alongside his soldiers,” said Ibrahim Madhoun, a Turkey-based Palestinian political analyst close to Hamas.

For Mohammad Abu Ghali, 27, who is living in a tent in Khan Younis after being displaced during the war, the circumstances of Sinwar’s death prove “he never laid down his weapon. He wasn’t hiding in tents or a tunnel as the occupation often claimed”.

“His death is a source of pride for all Palestinians,” he added. “This is not a victory for Israel.”

Madhoun said Hamas would continue its fight on the battlefield, blaming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for tanking attempts to reach a truce.

But opposition to Hamas inside Gaza has grown as the war drags on. Most civilians are displaced, hungry and bone-tired from a year of living in what United Nations officials have described as “hell on earth”.

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“I am neither happy nor sad, but I hope that if his death is real, it will lead to the end of the war,” said Abeer Ghousain, 27, from the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, as buzz about Sinwar’s possible death began to circulate online Thursday.

That will depend in part on who replaces Sinwar, who became a larger than life figure – “one of the prominent leaders of Palestinian history but also one which is the dominant – actually, the only – decision maker regarding the war”, Milshtein said.

Sinwar’s brother Mohammed would probably take over his elder sibling’s military role in Gaza, analysts said, but was not seen as having political potential.

The movement might opt not to announce its next political leader “for security reasons”, Madhoun said. Or it could follow the standard process of convening its Shura Council – a secretive consultative body elected by Hamas members in Gaza, the West Bank, the diaspora and Israeli jails – to vote on a new chief.

Sinwar’s successor would probably be based abroad, Madhoun said. Khaled Meshal, who led Hamas for two decades until 2017, could reprise the role, Abusada said. Meshal currently heads Hamas’ political bureau in the diaspora that is based out of Doha, Qatar. Khalil al-Hayya, Sinwar’s deputy who is also now in Qatar, is widely seen as another possible replacement.

“Those people, the outside leadership, are more flexible than Sinwar,” Milshtein said. Qatar, their host; Egypt, another key interlocutor in negotiations between Israel and Hamas; and the United States could put more pressure on these figures to reach a ceasefire, he added.

But Netanyahu vowed to continue the war.

“We cannot really expect or even dream that there will be a total collapse” of Hamas, Milshtein said. If Netanyahu did not seize the moment to reach a deal, he added, “it seems that unfortunately, the war of attrition in Gaza will continue, even after Sinwar is dead”.

The Washington Post

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