Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar was killed in an intelligence-based ground attack in southern Gaza. Sinwar was the politburo chief of the Palestinian group Hamas. The 828 Brigade of the Israel Ground Forces (IDF) was operating in the Tel al-Sultan area of ​​Rafah, where they found the body of the Hamas chief during a scan. CNN reported that Israeli soldiers cut off his fingers to confirm his death.
The report said Israeli soldiers entered the base and found a body believed to be that of Yahya Sinwar. They cut off his finger to confirm DNA, which soldiers had a profile of when Sinwar was in an Israeli prison for two decades until his release in 2011 in a prisoner-exchange deal.
“After the laboratory created the profile, we compared it to the profile that Sinwar had when he was serving as a prisoner here,” CNN quoted Chen Kugel, chief pathologist at the Israel National Center of Forensic Medicine. , then we were finally able to identify him through his DNA.”
Kugel told CNN that soldiers first tried to identify him by his teeth but that was not “sufficiently authenticated.”
Videos of Israeli soldiers searching the hideout surfaced on social media. In one video, two Israeli soldiers stand near a body (claimed to be that of Yahya Sinwar) with the index finger of his left hand cut off. Meanwhile, CNN in its report said that they have analyzed the videos in which all five fingers of his left hand are visible and then later one finger is missing.
The chief pathologist who performed the autopsy on Yahya Sinwar told CNN that Sinwar died from a gunshot wound to the head.
He told CNN that the Hamas leader was hit by other injuries, including a tank shell, but that he believed a gunshot to the head was what killed him. A video reviewed by NDTV on social media showed injuries to Yahya’s face and a portion of his skull blown off, corroborating claims made by the chief pathologist in the CNN report.
Israeli soldiers fired a tank round at the base before conducting a ground raid to assess damage and search for survivors.
Hamas is looking for a new leader
Hamas is looking for a new political leader outside Gaza. Additionally, his brother – Mohammed Sinwar – is expected to play a larger role in directing the war against Israel in the region.
Yahya Sinwar was the mastermind of the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that killed more than 1,200 people, resulting in a year-long Israeli operation in Gaza that killed more than 40,000 people.
Israel has vowed to root out Hamas from Gaza and has so far removed most of its top leadership, including its previous chief Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in July.
Hamas has a history of replacing its fallen leaders quickly and efficiently, with its top decision-making body, the Shura Council, tasked with naming a new head.
While Hamas had a separate military and political branch, when Sinwar took over as Politburo chief after Haniyeh’s death, he unified the two branches.
After Sinwar’s death, Israel now hopes that the hostages still trapped in Gaza will return. Sinwar’s deputy Khalil al-Hayya, who is seen as a possible successor, made a defiant comment saying that the hostages would not be returned until Israeli forces withdrew from Gaza and the war ended. go.
