Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has confirmed that Hamas’s top remaining commander in Gaza was killed by an Israeli airstrike earlier this month.
Muhammad Sinwar, the younger brother of former Hamas Gaza leader and 7 October planner Yahya Sinwar, was rumoured to have been killed two weeks ago, with reports that this body had been recovered from a tunnel in Khan Younis.
In comments made today from the plenum of the Knesset, Netanyahu described Muhammad Sinwar as having been “eliminated”. Many members of the Knesset applauded Mr Netanyahu following his speech, but at least one lawmaker attempted to confront him with what appeared to be a map of Israel, before being escorted away by security.
Sinwar was believed to have been hiding in a tunnel adjacent to the European hospital in Khan Younis, alongside some of Hamas’s top remaining leaders, including Muhammad Shabana, commander of the terror organisation’s Rafah Brigade. Israeli airstrikes targeted that area earlier this month. The Hamas-controlled civil defence agency said that 28 people had died in the strikes, while IDF said at the time that it had conducted a “precise strike” on “Hamas terrorists in a command and control centre” believed to be beneath the hospital and an adjacent school.
Reports from Israeli media in recent days suggested that Israeli intelligence had managed to pinpoint Sinwar’s whereabouts at a time when he had arranged to meet fellow commanders, and when he was not engaging in his usual behaviour of having hostages in his immediate vicinity to protect himself from Israeli strikes. Israel’s Channel 12 was told that the country’s intelligence services had continuously tracked Sinwar, but that it refrained from striking “if there’s even a one percent chance that hostages are in the area.”
A previous commander of Hamas’s Khan Younis brigade, Mohammed Sinwar was one of those believed to have taken Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit hostage in 2006.
Palestinian media separately reported the death of a third Sinwar sibling, Zakaria Sinwar, in an Israeli airstrike last week.
