The epilogue of a hunt. Israel announced Thursday October 17 that Hamas leader Yahya Sinouar, considered the architect of the October 7 attacks, had been killed during an operation in Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip. For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this death marked “the beginning of the end“the war in Gaza.
For their part, the army and the internal intelligence services specify that this “elimination” marks the end of “a year-long hunt” of this 61-year-old radical activist, who has led the Palestinian Islamist movement in Gaza since 2017, before being named political leader of Hamas in early August after the death of Ismaïl Haniyeh, killed in Tehran on July 31 in an attack attributed to Israel.
In order to remove certain doubts about this “elimination“, the Israeli army released a short video, filmed by a drone showing an injured man, and which it presents as images of Hamas leader, Yahya Sinouar, just before he was killed in a military operation in Gaza.
The man, seated in the armchair of a gutted living room on the first floor of a partially destroyed building, has his face hidden by a fabric that could be a keffiyeh and has in his hand an object resembling a saber which he throws on the drone. According to the army, these images are those of Yahya Sinouar “a few moments with his elimination”.
According to the first elements, it was almost by chance that the Israeli army finally eliminated the man it had been stubbornly searching for for more than a year. On the morning of Wednesday October 16, during a patrol in the Tel al-Sultan neighborhood of Rafah, at the southern tip of the Gaza Strip, an Israeli soldier saw a suspicious figure entering and leaving a building. The alert is given but the Israeli army has no idea of the target in question. A little later in the day, three men were seen passing from house to house: exchanges of fire took place and the group split up.
According to the Israeli forces, a man – who we discovered was actually Yahya Sinouar – then found himself alone on the first floor of a half-destroyed building after a tank shell fired. The Israeli army spokesperson assures that his troops then tried to search the premises, but that they withdrew after a grenade exploded.
A drone then takes over – the images which now appear in a loop on social networks and certain continuous news channels -: facing the masked man, the Israeli army fires another shell. It was not until the next day, Thursday morning, that Israeli soldiers returned to the area. They then discovered the remains of a man covered in dust in the middle of the rubble, wearing a bulletproof vest. Wads of bills, around 40,000 shekels or nearly 10,000 euros, several pieces of identification and a packet of mints were found on him.
In the evening, a first DNA analysis was carried out: it was Yahia Sinouar, Israel’s number one enemy, who died after 12 months and 10 days of escaping Israeli attacks.
