Sinwar's killing could signal deeper strategic problems for Israel ahead

For the past year, Israel has depicted Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar as a coward hiding in Gaza's fortified underground tunnels, shielded by 22 handcuffed Israeli hostages.

But drone footage of the Hamas leader's last minutes released by the Israeli military showed a different Sinwar.

Dressed in military fatigues, badly wounded, and covered in dust in a ruined above-ground apartment after an exchange of fire with Israeli troops, Sinwar, seemingly alone, made one last gesture of defiance before he was killed by a barrage of tank shells and missiles.

More important than shining a light on apparent Israeli dis- and misinformation, the impact of the contrast in images suggests that Israel's management of its information war is backfiring. This is much like its targeted assassinations, which have failed to spark the collapse of groups like Hamas or Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shia group.

In death, Sinwar's defiance and the debunking of Israeli assertions have garnered him respect among Palestinians and Arabs, including critics who held him co-responsible for Gaza's suffering in the past year and/or were long opposed to Hamas.

"Even people who were angry about Hamas, when they saw. . . he had been killed during clashes and not hiding in a tunnel, as Israel was always claiming, they felt sorry and sad for him. Sinwar's death will raise his popularity," said Mohammed Sobeh, speaking to the Financial Times from Khan Younis in Gaza.

Alarm bells

Long on Israel's most wanted list, officials accused Sinwar of masterminding last year's October 7 attack on Israel that sparked the Gaza war. Many Palestinians, including supporters of the attack, hold Sinwar for prolonging Gaza's agony by allegedly having complicated ceasefire negotiations.

On X, Ghanem Nuseibeh, the founder of a London-based strategy and management consultancy with close ties to the United Arab Emirates and a rare Arab campaigner against ant-Semitism, warned that Israel's killing of Sinwar and the release of the footage was counterproductive.

"A very worrying trend is emerging in the Arabic cyberspace. Unlike, for example, when (Osama) Bin Laden was killed, Sinwar is getting a lot of positive publicity, almost a hero figure in Arabic circles… It doesn't matter what I or the West or moderate Muslims say about Sinwar. What matters is the Arab street, and he has turned into a hero. Very worrying indeed," Nuseibeh said.

Nusseibeh's warning should ring alarm bells in Jerusalem, but is unlikely to do so.

Instead, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's policy will bolster Sinwar's post-mortem popularity, which is fuelled by a generation of Palestinians' loss of hope because of Israel's ultra-nationalism, devastating war on Gaza and stepped-up repression in the occupied West Bank.

"What's the need of rebuilding Gaza if the problem still exists, if I'm still under occupation?... Whenever I'm under occupation, and everything is restricted, this will never end, and no one will have safety, and no one will have peace whenever I don't have peace as a Palestinian," photographer Motaz Azaiza recently told BBC.

Sinwar's killing "only strengthens Hamas' determination, tenacity, and resolve," Walid al-Hubali, a resident of Ramallah on the West Bank, told me.

No end to the resistance

Beyond Palestinians' despair and lack of prospects, Sinwar's enhanced status in death spotlights the gap between some Arab rulers' attitudes towards Hamas, Palestinian aspirations, and Israel's war conduct and public opinion in the Middle East.

"Seventy percent of my population is younger than me. For most of them, they never really knew much about the Palestinian issue. And so they're being introduced to it for the first time through this conflict. It's a huge problem. Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don't, but my people do," Saudi Arabia's crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman reportedly told US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, according to The Atlantic.

Saudi officials said The Atlantic had quoted the crown prince inaccurately.

But the bottom line is that Bin Salman, Nuseibeh and Azaiza are telling Israel that efforts to bomb Palestinians into submission are failing, producing a generation that has nowhere to go and nothing to lose, and dashing Israeli hopes of regional acceptance, even if Palestinians' most immediate aspiration is to see an end to the war.

"Sinwar's death is par for the course. Palestinians expected it, he expected it. Sinwar and others will inspire the next generation of resistance. It will come, but that is for later. Right now, all we want is an end to this war," a Gaza resident, who asked not to be identified, told me.

Future of Hamas

Rather than sparking doom and gloom in Hamas's ranks, Sinwar's killing is likely to reinforce the group's sense of success.

"Hamas has the upper hand. It has remained steadfast" and brought the Israeli military into "a state of attrition," the group's former leader, Khaled Meshaal, told The New York Times in September.

In that vein, Hamas senior official Khalil al-Hayya, confirming Sinwar's killing, suggested that the leader's death would not weaken the group's resolve to release Israeli hostages taken a year ago only if Israel ends the war.

Meshaal and Al-Hayya are both touted as potential successors to Sinwar.

Senior Israeli military officials, including military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, have conceded that Netanyahu's goal of destroying Hamas is unrealistic.

In August, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant went as far as to tell a parliamentary committee that this aim of "total victory" over Hamas was "nonsense."

And retired Major General Gadi Shamni, a former commander of the Israeli military's Gaza division and military secretary to former prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ariel Sharon, asserted that "Hamas is winning this war. Our soldiers are winning every tactical encounter with Hamas, but we're losing the war and in a big way."