IDF soldiers standing over Sinwar's body Ynet

 

"Pretty rich after a year of undermining Netanyahu, saying he MUST go to a ceasefire, MUST deescalate, trying to stop Israel from going into Rafah WHERE SINWAR WAS KILLED, and Kamala boycotting his joint address to Congress - now Biden & Harris have the nerve to congratulate him for setting the path to peace."

"I'm sure the phone call sounds something like 'You were right Bibi [Netanyahu], we apologize'." 

US Rep. Mike Waltz, X 

"Sinwar died while beaten, persecuted and on the run -- he didn't die as a commander, but as someone who only cared for himself."

"This is a clear message to all of our enemies."

Israeli Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant

 

"Those prisoners [Israeli hostages] will not return to you before the end of the aggression on Gaza and the withdrawal from Gaza."

Khalil al-Hayya, Qatar-based Hamas Sinwar deputy

  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explains the importance of Rafah's Philadelphi corridor during a press conference in Jerusalem on September 4, 2024. (Photo by Abir Sultan/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

It took years to plan, a large, shocking event, an ambitious plan for a dedicated terrorist group to embark upon, knowing it would be entering the lair of a lion whose wrath, once provoked, would eclipse in numbers any death-dealing the terrorist group, even when tasking 6,000 of its operatives to enter Israel at the Gaza border with instructions to plunder, destroy, rape, mutilate and murder would achieve. The plan was explicit in its dedication to death-dealing for Israelis, another mini-Holocaust they could be proud of. A mission their leader sent them to fulfill and to document. Grisly scenarios they would be proud of and circulate as a demonstration of just how courageous men armed with total disregard for life, utterly devoid of compassion, using all the weapons of war on a civilian population.

And just as it took years in careful, precision planning by a man whose purpose for existence was a laser focus on destroying Israel, in the process terrorizing an entire population of Israelis never knowing when or where the next strike would come from, this man himself, steeped deep in his vision of 'liberation' and conquest became very familiar with the dread he had inspired in his potential victims. For a year since he dispatched those thousands of terrorists eager to do credit to Yahya Sinwar's shock and awe demonstration of Palestinian inhumanity, the architect of the October 7 slaughter became a desperate fugitive.

Sinwar, after 23 years in an Israeli prison for terrorism as a member of the Israel-destroying Hamas breakaway group from the Muslim Brotherhood, believed he knew the ethos and dearest-held emotional attachments of Jews; care and solicitation for the welfare of fellow Jews. And he meant to exploit that to its full potential. After all, hadn't he benefited from that Jewish reaction himself, when  in exchange for the return of one lone abducted Israeli soldier, over a thousand Palestinian prisoners were traded, himself included, and enabled to carry on with their pet project of threat, destabilization, violence and mayhem against Israel.

The pinnacle therefore, of that infamous October 7 day of sadistic savagery was to round up Israeli children, the elderly and infirm, women and soldiers to be held for their guaranteed ransom potential in freeing up more Palestinians who languish in Israeli prisons after having been arrested and placed on trial, found guilty of the crimes of threatening, attacking and murdering Jews. Maltreatment of the age-and-gender vulnerable abductees, their humiliation, punishing living arrangements, sexual predation and starvation would do nothing to diminish their value as exchange objects.

 

IDF soldiers evacuating Sinwar's body on a stretcher

 

Thursday was the turning point in the Israel Defense Forces' search for the whereabouts of the October 7 mastermind. He had spent the year since the slaughter in southern Israel, deep in the bowels of Gaza, with him six Israeli hostages as living shields. When those six were too weak and emaciated, suffering from torture and privation, their usefulness was ended and they too were murdered. Israeli intelligence was certain he had moved to the tunnels of Rafah, where several Hamas divisions remained intact after the bulk of the Hamas militias elsewhere within the Gaza Strip had been neutered. On that day, he and  his bodyguards were cornered following a gunfight with Israeli troops, who called in a tank to fire a shell on a building that Sinwar had taken shelter in.

A drone had verified the presence of a terrorist in the previously bombed building. He was found later, partially buried in the rubble that had resulted from tank-fire, dead. The building's collapse had sent a wooden stake, not through the heart of that death zombie; his brain was impaled by it, a fitting end for a human monster. Tal al-Sultan in Gaza's southern Rafah city, hard by the border with Egypt, through which arms and ammunition had been smuggled into Gaza for years, was the scene of his death. When the "dead man walking" was found, he had with him, a gun, a knife, a flak jacket and 40,000 Israeli shekels.