In its first acknowledgement of the death of Yahya Sinwar, Hamas says his killing by Israel will turn into “a curse on the occupiers”. Meanwhile, the IDF has released footage of his final moments in Gaza. Listen to a Daily special as you scroll.
Friday 18 October 2024 15:34, UK
Throughout this conflict, funerals have become a daily occurrence in the Middle East.
New images from the southern Lebanese city of Nabatieh show scenes of mourning after Israeli airstrikes on municipal buildings killed the mayor and 15 other people this week.
Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati condemned the attack, saying it “intentionally” targeted a council meeting.
A spokesman for the Israel Defence Forces said it had launched raids targeting dozens of Hezbollah targets in the area and destroyed a tunnel used by the Iran-backed group.
By Alex Rossi, international correspondent
The release of drone footage by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) of Yahya Sinwar’s final moments has provoked a torrent of different views across the Middle East.
The video shows the Hamas leader in a smashed-up apartment, sitting in an armchair, clothed like a rank-and-file militant.
He turns to the drone and throws what appears to be a stick before the video ends. Moments later, he was killed by a tank shell.
How it’s being interpreted depends, of course, on who you are, where you come from, and what you believe.
Sinwar’s final moments are, for many Palestinians, emblematic of their struggle and resistance against an expansionist and aggressive Zionist state.
For them, he’s a hero, a symbol of steadfastness, dressed in a keffiyeh – a Palestinian headscarf – and carrying a rifle in the face of overwhelming odds.
His rhetoric has often emphasised the Palestinian struggle against oppression and his leadership resonated deeply with those who saw him as a champion of their cause.
“The greatest gift Israel can give me is to assassinate me,” he said in May 2021. “I prefer to die a martyr from an F-16 than to die of coronavirus or a stroke or a heart attack…”
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The United Nations humanitarian office has accused Israel today of using “war-like” tactics against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, citing killings by soldiers and attacks on Palestinian olive groves by Israeli settlers.
This month so far, OCHA said it had received reports that settlers have carried out 32 attacks against Palestinians and their properties, including on their slow-growing olive trees.
The latest was a woman killed while harvesting her olives in Jenin yesterday, the agency said.
Hamas, which carried out the 7 October attacks, is not in charge in the West Bank and no hostages are being held there.
“It is, frankly, very concerning that it’s not only attacks on people, but it’s attacks on their olive groves as well,” OCHA spokesperson Jens Laerke said.
“The olive harvest is an economic lifeline for tens of thousands of Palestinian families in the West Bank,” he added, saying that UN agencies were assessing how they can support them.
In total, around 600 mainly olive trees have been burned, vandalised or stolen by settlers, the agency said in a report that showed a Palestinian man standing next to an olive tree stump with its branches sawn off.
Dozens of Israelis have also been killed in Palestinian street attacks over the past year.
Israel says its actions in the West Bank have been in response to what it has described as a drastic increase in such incidents.
Violence has surged in the West Bank since the Hamas-led 7 October attacks on Israel last year that triggered Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.
OCHA says nine Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces there between 8 and 14 October, including one child.
“Israeli forces have been using lethal, war-like tactics in the West Bank, raising serious concerns over excessive use of force and deepening people’s humanitarian needs,” said Mr Laerke.
He added that Israeli forces had accused most of those killed of being involved in attacking Israelis.
We reported briefly earlier on comments from the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon and its determination to remain in the country despite a number of “deliberate” attacks by Israeli forces in recent days.
We now have a little more detail on the remarks, which also included claims that efforts to help civilians in villages in the war zone were being hampered by Israeli shelling.
The UN mission, known as UNIFIL, is stationed in southern Lebanon to monitor hostilities along the demarcation line with Israel – an area that has seen fierce clashes this month between Israeli troops and Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters.
Two peacekeepers were wounded by an Israeli strike near a watchtower last week, prompting criticism from some of the 50 countries that provide troops to the 10,000-strong force.
“We’ve been targeted several times, five times under deliberate attack,” UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti said.
“I think the role of UNIFIL at the moment is more important than ever. We need to be here.”
Israel claims UN forces provide a human shield for Hezbollah fighters and has told UNIFIL to evacuate peacekeepers from southern Lebanon for their own safety – a request that it has refused.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected accusations the force had been deliberately targeted.
However, Mr Tenenti challenged this, saying that in one of the incidents he described, Israeli forces entered a UNIFIL site and remained there for 45 minutes.
Asked whether UNIFIL would consider defending itself against Israel, he said it was an option but that at the moment it was trying to reduce tensions.
He also voiced concerns about civilians remaining in southern Lebanon whom he said aid workers were struggling to reach because of ongoing Israeli shelling.
“The devastation and destruction of many villages along the Blue Line, and even beyond, is shocking,” he said, referring to a UN-mapped line separating Lebanon from Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Asked about the downing of a drone near a UNIFIL ship off the Lebanese coast yesterday, he said: “The drone was coming from the south but circling around the ship and getting very, very close, a few metres away from the ship.”
An investigation is under way, he added.
Our military analyst Michael Clarke has been discussing the impact of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s death – and who might replace him at the top of the organisation.
“It’s not that there aren’t other possibilities,” he said.
“There’s Mohammed Ibrahim Sinwar, his younger brother, who’s only 49 now.
“He’s a possibility. The Israelis have gone after him at least seven times and failed to assassinate him. They thought they had a couple of times, but they didn’t.
“So the Israelis obviously regard the younger brother as a possible leader, or Khaled Mashal, again, somebody that they very famously went after in Jordan in 1997.
“And Mashal is a more pragmatic character.”
Clarke said he thought Hamas would make an announcement on their leadership relatively soon.
“But whether those people effectively become the leaders, that’s the key question, because Sinwar is hard to replace,” Clarke said.
“He had such authority and he exercised real terror over people, that whoever they name will not necessarily be able to take on that degree of authority that he had over the organisation.”
He said Mr Sinwar had accepted the reality of his fate by the time of his death, which he said was reflected in the footage showing his final moments.
“He knew what was going to happen to him,” he said.
“We knew that he wouldn’t survive this war. And what we see in that little bit of video, he is obviously wounded.
“By the time he’s sitting in an upstairs room, the most vulnerable place you can go to in a building is to go upstairs when you know that they’re on to you. I mean, a couple of tank rounds came into the building.
“He must have known as he sat there injured, throwing a piece of wood at the drone. He knew what was going to happen next.”
A top political leader of Hamas, Khalil al-Hayya, has confirmed the death of the group’s leader, Yahya Sinwar.
He said the death “will only strengthen us”.
Mr Al-Hayyaa – deputy Gaza Hamas chief and the group’s chief negotiator – delivered a televised statement in which he reiterated it would not release Israeli hostages captured in the 7 October attack on Israel until “the aggression” on the besieged Palestinian enclave stops and Israeli forces withdraw
“Those prisoners will not return to you before the end of the aggression on Gaza and the withdrawal from Gaza,” he said.
He added that the death will turn into a “curse on the occupiers”.
As we reported in our 9.49 post, the Israeli military said it had killed two “terrorists” who crossed into the country from Jordan after they opened fire on IDF troops.
A military source with the General Command of the Jordanian Armed Forces has now said on its website that there is “no truth” in reports that Jordanian soldiers had crossed into Israel.
The Jordanian military stressed the necessity of receiving information from official sources and not circulating rumours, the source added.
The incident follows a separate attack on 8 September when a gunman from Jordan killed three Israeli civilians at the Allenby Bridge border crossing in the occupied West Bank before security forces shot him dead.
Anti-Israeli sentiment runs high in Jordan, and the Allenby Bridge attack was the first of its kind along the border with Jordan since the 7 October attacks of 2023.
Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty in 1994 and have close security ties.
Dozens of trucks cross daily from Jordan, with goods from Jordan and the Gulf that supply both the West Bank and Israeli markets.
It’s a pivotal moment, but will the death of Yahya Sinwar change anything?
On this extra edition of the Daily podcast, host Niall Paterson speaks to our military expert Professor Michael Clarke to examine what consequences his assassination will have on the conflict.
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While Israel’s killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had been widely confirmed, we had yet to see any response to the reports from the Palestinian group itself.
However, a statement issued by one of Hamas’s political leaders this morning tacitly – but not directly – appeared to acknowledge the death of Mr Sinwar and said that Israel is mistaken if it “believes that killing our leaders means the end of our movement and the struggle of the Palestinian people”.
Hamas political bureau member Bassem Naim said past leaders in the organisation had also been killed and that “Hamas each time became stronger and more popular, and these leaders became an icon for future generations to continue the journey towards a free Palestine”.
He added that it was “painful and distressing to lose beloved people, especially extraordinary leaders” but that the Palestinian militant group was sure it would be “eventually victorious”.
When asked if the statement was a confirmation of Mr Sinwar’s death, Mr Naim said it was not.
Yahya Sinwar was the mastermind behind the 7 October attacks and one of Israel’s most formidable enemies, writes international affairs editor Dominic Waghorn.
His death means Israelis have killed two of their biggest foes in less than a month.
But Sinwar was unique in his ability to understand and torment the Israeli psyche. He spent years in jail studying the ways of his captors and becoming fluent in their language. He knew that to beat your enemy you must know them first.
He understood that Israel could be lulled into a false sense of security. Under his command, Israelis were deceived into thinking Hamas wanted a period of calm, while in reality it was preparing for the biggest attack in either sides’ history.
Watch Waghorn’s report on the significance of the Hamas leader’s killing below:
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