Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar’s final moments: On the run, hurt, alone, but still defiant

At the end, the fearsome militant leader who had helped unleash a vicious war seemed barely a threat.

In video captured by an Israeli drone, a man sat alone, badly wounded and caked in dust amid the ruins of a building in the Gaza Strip, wrapped in a kaffiyeh and staring directly into the camera. The man, Israeli officials say, was Yahya Sinwar, the chief of Hamas.

The stare-down lasted some 20 seconds, then the man limply but defiantly hurled a broken piece of wood toward the drone. Not long afterward, officials say, an Israeli soldier shot him in the head, and a tank shell flattened part of the building.

So ended the long hunt for one of the world’s most wanted men. It began hours after the brutal Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that Sinwar helped orchestrate, and concluded amid the destruction of a Rafah neighborhood resembling so many parts of Gaza, leveled by the Israeli military in the year since.

The search involved Israeli commandos and spies as well as a special unit established inside the headquarters of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, and at the CIA. It used a sophisticated electronic surveillance dragnet and ground-penetrating radar provided by the United States.

New details about Sinwar’s movements over the past year have emerged since his death, including the fact that Israeli intelligence officers had seen mounting evidence since August that Sinwar, or possibly other top Hamas leaders, might be in Rafah’s Tel al-Sultan neighborhood.

They observed people there moving about with their faces covered, sometimes apparently surrounded by guards, suggesting that they were senior Hamas officials or hostages. And in September, they found Sinwar’s DNA in urine collected from a tunnel.

In the end, Sinwar was discovered and killed in Tel al-Sultan somewhat by happenstance, by a group of troops on a routine patrol. But Israeli forces had spent weeks scouring the neighborhood based on the intelligence that senior Hamas officials were hiding there, possibly with Israeli hostages.

Sinwar died aboveground, just a few hundred meters from a tunnel complex where he had been hiding this summer, according to Israeli officials, and where six Israeli hostages were killed in late August.

This account of the hunt for Sinwar, and his eventual killing Wednesday, is based on interviews with Israeli and American government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence operations, as well as classified Israeli government documents obtained by The New York Times.

Sinwar had been a spectral presence since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks. There had been only glimpses of him over the past year, and he is believed to have spent most of his time hidden underground.

Yet he commanded Hamas’ forces in an ongoing war and managed to play an active role in the negotiations over a cease-fire and the release of Israeli hostages.

There had been near-misses along the way. On Jan. 31, Israeli commandos raided an elaborate warren of tunnels in Khan Younis— dubbed “The Kingdom” by Israeli officials — based on the intelligence that Sinwar was hiding there. It turned out he had been but had left the bunker just days earlier.

In addition to stacks of Israeli shekels, Sinwar left documents there that detailed years of secret meetings among Hamas leaders planning the Oct. 7 attacks, which the documents refer to as “The Big Project.”

The killing of Sinwar is perhaps Israel’s most significant military achievement of the war, and it raised hopes that the elimination of the Hamas chief and the decimation of the group’s leadership might bring about a deal to end the conflict and release the Israeli hostages captured on Oct. 7, 2023, and still held in Gaza. Since his death, however, both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Hamas have pledged to continue the battle.

In a statement issued Friday, Hamas said that Sinwar’s death “will only increase the strength, steadfastness, and determination” of the group’s fighters “to continue on their path, and to be loyal to their blood and sacrifices.”

Sinwar may have been hobbled and diminished in his final moments, but the Hamas statement sought to project an image of him as a defiant fighter, “advancing and not retreating, brandishing his weapon, engaging and confronting the occupation army at the forefront of the ranks.”

A cold trail heats up

Early this year, Israeli intelligence concluded that Sinwar had fled a bunker in the center of Khan Younis in response to news reports citing Israeli officials saying he was hiding in a tunnel beneath the city. From there, he retreated to the western part of the city before finally relocating to Rafah.

For much of the summer, Sinwar’s trail was cold. Officials said he had abandoned electronic communications, allowing him to avoid the surveillance net set up by Israeli and US intelligence agencies. He was thought to be moving between Rafah and Khan Younis, staying in touch with Hamas operatives using a network of human couriers, but there was precious little specific intelligence about his movements.

Then, in August, came mounting evidence pointing to Tel al-Sultan.

On Aug. 31, Israeli forces recovered the bodies of six slain hostages, five of whom Hamas had captured at a music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, in an underground tunnel complex in Tel al-Sultan. Israeli military officials said they believed that the hostages had been executed by their captors just days earlier.

Weeks later, while investigating the same tunnel complex, Israeli forces confirmed through a DNA test of a urine sample that Sinwar — whose genetic and other information they had from his decades in Israeli prisons — had been hiding there at some point. But they never pinpointed his whereabouts, and there was discussion among Israeli intelligence officials that the Hamas leader might actually be dead.

Then, in late September, Hamas sent a message to the group’s political leaders in Qatar, saying that Hamas’ leadership in Gaza was committed to a cease-fire proposal that had been negotiated in July but fell apart.

Israeli and American officials did not believe that Hamas was serious about accepting a deal but saw the message as strong evidence that Sinwar was alive and still directing the group from the rubble of Gaza. He was also thought to be with the commander of the Tel al-Sultan battalion, Mahmoud Hamdan — one of the few high-ranking Hamas leaders still believed to be alive at the time.

Throughout the war, Israel had pieced together the whereabouts of several Hamas leaders with intelligence collected on the battlefield, using that information for lethal operations that killed most of the top echelon of Hamas’ leadership and other military commanders.

A tightening dragnet and a bit of luck

The intelligence collection around Tel al-Sultan in recent weeks had prompted Israeli forces to increase patrols in the neighborhood, and one Israeli military official said that operations in the area were attempts by the military to gather clues, rather than raids guided by precise intelligence.

In this way, Wednesday’s killing of Sinwar was, for the Israelis, a stroke of luck.

That morning, soldiers from an Israeli training brigade operating in Tel al-Sultan spotted three men moving from house to house, one of them trailing the other two. They had no idea one of the men was Sinwar.

“Yahya Sinwar hid in an area that our forces had surrounded for a long time,” Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesperson, said Thursday night. “We did not know he was there, but we continued to operate decisively.”

It is unclear what brought Sinwar aboveground, although Israeli officials have said that all Hamas operatives in the tunnels — even the group’s leaders — must occasionally escape the dark, claustrophobic conditions and breathe fresh air. Israeli officials said that a July airstrike that killed Mohammed Deif, the shadowy chief of Hamas’ military wing, was launched during one such occasion when Deif came to the surface.

In recent weeks, Israeli troops had stepped up ambushes and efforts to clear the many tunnels around Rafah. The army even pumped some of them full of thick nontoxic gas in an attempt to smoke out fighters when they assessed no hostages were in those parts of the tunnels, according to two Israeli military officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press about sensitive military tactics.

After the Israeli troops spotted the three men Wednesday, a firefight broke out, and one Israeli soldier was badly wounded. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesperson, said that two of the three men fled into a building, and the third into an adjacent one.

The troops killed the first two militants and turned their attention to the man in the other building, deploying a drone to examine the building’s interior. The drone, entering a ruined house from the upper floor, captured footage of a wounded man sitting in a chair, his face swaddled in a kaffiyeh to hide his identity.

The man hurled a stick at the drone, according to the footage. Israeli officials said a sniper shot the man in the head, and a tank fired at the building.

It was getting dark by then, and the troops decided to return to the two buildings Thursday morning to lessen the danger from booby traps that Hamas often sets inside buildings it has evacuated.

In one of the buildings, they found automatic weapons, thousands of dollars’ worth of Israeli currency, a pamphlet with prayer verses and even a packet of Mentos breath mints, according to photos from the scene provided by Israeli officials.

The troops found a man in the rubble who looked strikingly like Sinwar, with a large hole in his forehead and a gash on his knee. An electrical cord had been tied around his severely injured right arm to stanch the bleeding.

The Israelis cut off one of his fingers to use for DNA testing and took photographs of his teeth to match with Sinwar’s dental records on file from his years in an Israeli prison.

Based on fingerprints and dental records, Israeli officials determined that it was Sinwar. By Thursday evening, his body had arrived at Israel’s National Institute for Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv, where Dr. Chen Kugel, the head of the institute, oversaw an autopsy.

Later that night, Netanyahu announced to the country that Sinwar was dead, calling it a milestone in “the sunset of Hamas’ evil reign” in Gaza.

But he also appeared to rebuff the idea that Sinwar’s death might mean the end of the war.

“The mission before us is still unfinished,” he said.