One photo of Yahya Al-Sinwar, head of the Hamas political bureau, at the moment of his martyrdom; It demolished the Israeli narrative that was broadcast by the Israeli establishment throughout an entire year of war, and it is the same narrative that was repeated by many non-Israeli circles, hostile to the man, his organization, and his resistance project.
The man was killed with two of his companions in a location where the Israeli occupation forces were advancing in the Tal al-Sultan area in Rafah, while carrying his rifle and quiver, and traces of the occupation’s bullets appeared in his face and knee. Also, drone recordings showed that he fought the Quadcopter planes with a stick in his left hand after his right hand was injured ( It looked like it had been cut.) The man was in a quarrel.
He was not killed among civilians, or in places sheltering the displaced, and he was not taking shelter with Israeli prisoners. He was in Tal al-Sultan in Rafah, not in Deir al-Balah or in Khan Yunis, and although the latency in the tunnel is not a problem, because the tunnel was made to compensate for the lost combat topography in the sector. Gaza, and in order to prevent the enemy from having an opportunity, as one of the most important military objectives is to kill the leaders and destroy the command and control rooms, the man was above the ground, with his equipment, in a combat zone.
This is not the picture that the occupation wanted for the end of Yahya Sinwar. It wanted him as a prisoner in a scene of humiliation and disgrace, or dead in a tunnel, among civilians, or in the tents of the displaced and shelter centers. However, the photo that the occupation soldiers published for the purpose of bragging and show off made it impossible for the occupation institution to create a false image of the man’s death.
However, Benjamin Netanyahu, in his speech celebrating the killing of Yahya Sinwar, repeated the propaganda about “the man who implicated his people and hid on the run,” opposing the image published by his soldiers, but it was too late, and everything that could be said faded away alongside the revealing image of the situation. In which the man was martyred, in a situation in which he was a soldier among his soldiers, and a fighter among his fighters, while Yair bin Benjamin Netanyahu spends his time in Miami in the United States, while his father’s soldiers are killed on the battlefield!
But the photo is not the only one that missed the opportunity for propaganda woven by the occupation out of lies, but it is the surprise, as the man was not killed in an assassination operation based on intelligence information, but he was killed only because he was in an advanced combat position, when the occupation soldiers noticed three Palestinian gunmen entering a house, so they fired at them. A tank shell. When the soldiers tried to enter the house, Al-Sinwar threw two hand grenades at them and clashed with them. The soldiers again took cover from tank shells and drones, which Al-Sinwar fought with a few sticks and stones after his right hand was hit.
The story lasted, according to occupation sources, from ten o’clock in the morning on Wednesday the 16th October/ October, until four in the afternoon on the same day. Only the next day did the soldiers return to comb the place, and because it is difficult for the Israeli to curb his tendency to show off, from the smallest soldier to the head of the occupation entity, his soldiers quickly published a picture of the man they suspected of being Sinwar.
In this case, as much as the killing of Sinwar can be considered an achievement for the occupation, it is a failure in another respect, not only because the moment of his martyrdom demolished the Israeli narrative and reinforced the fact that Sinwar is in the Palestinian and Arab consciousness a hero who was martyred in an advanced combat position, but also because the occupation intelligence was unable to reach To him, or specify his location throughout the entire year.
This is the intelligence that failed against the man on October 7th/ October 2023, after which it failed to pursue him in a small, confined, flat, and exposed geography, where the occupation’s tanks, planes, and monitoring devices were deployed, reinforced with all the technologies possessed by the West, led by the United States of America, whose press published many times about devoting its intelligence and technological efforts to pursuing Yahya Sinwar.
But is there any surprise in the martyrdom of a man leading a battle in a small geography that is no more than hot if compared to the areas of major cities in the world?! Or was his martyrdom an achievement for him in the security sense, and in the symbolic sense, after he was able to mislead the occupation intelligence and the United States of America for an entire year to end up in an advanced combat position without them knowing that they were fighting Yahya Sinwar?!
Some of the occupation media quickly remembered Abdul Qader al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader who was martyred in the Battle of Qastal on August 8. April/ April 1948, without his killers knowing that he was Al-Husseini. This creates a new symbolism for the Palestinians, connected to their history of struggle from Abdel Qader al-Husseini to Yahya Sinwar. In this way, Sinwar himself records the natural extension of the first fighters from his people, and the natural response to the Nakba that has lasted for 76 years.
The martyrdom of Sinwar was expected, or it is the most likely outcome for a man in a war of these natures and characteristics, and in a place like this, and this is his situation, and this does not warrant pride for the state armed with nuclear weapons that mobilized itself and the world to wage war in an area no larger than a neighborhood. However, the Israeli establishment Government and security will add Sinwar's martyrdom to the file of its achievements presented to the society, which shook Sinwar's confidence in his ability to continue in Palestine, and stoked existential anxiety in it.
This is something that was not lost on Benjamin Netanyahu’s celebratory speech when he returned and described his war on the Gaza Strip as a “resurrection war,” that is, a war of renaissance, a second war of independence, and a war with a small organization in a very narrow geography. This is its description. The occupation, as an entity and as a society, cannot recover from its consequences with the martyrdom of the Palestinian leader of that war.
For the jubilant “Israel”, whose politicians are racing to take the first shot – Galant, the defense minister, Halevy, the chief of staff, Ronen Bar, the head of the Shin Bet, and Netanyahu, the prime minister – it is too early to say that this achievement will end the war, even if Netanyahu tries to suggest that The remaining goals of the war are to recover the prisoners, or in other words, it is as if Netanyahu is saying: We dismantled Hamas and killed its leaders, so that Gaza would be without Hamas, so all that remains for us is to recover the prisoners.
But Netanyahu will find that the return of the prisoners will only be through negotiations with Hamas, which he said he dismantled and killed its leaders.
There is an analysis that suggests that the martyrdom of Sinwar may push Netanyahu to come down from the tree and seek again a prisoner exchange deal, but this deal will interfere with other files such as the withdrawal of the occupation forces from Gaza, especially since the occupation will view the situation as a position of strength that allows it to impose its conditions. Which means it won't be easy.
The war on Gaza also overlaps with the war on Lebanon, and with the expected escalation with Iran, which means that the moment is ambiguous and could be open to more than one possibility.
The position of the Hamas movement, whose president was martyred in Rafah in the Gaza Strip, less than three months after the assassination of its former president, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, remains as the movement is expected to have prepared plans and alternatives in the event of the absence of its president, and to be in this unprecedented, devastating war that has presented It has its basic cadre and its first description. It has prepared for how to deal with the absence of its president, without this meaning that its losses are easy, and that the matter is easy, not only in the absence of Sinwar with his symbolic, moral and leadership weight, but in the totality of what the movement lost and presented in the context of a war that destroyed the Gaza Strip. All with annihilation and destruction.
This means that the movement, from the first moment in which the war of occupation revealed its comprehensive destructive nature, knew that the paths of the war were different from any previous war, and that the movement’s position was different from any previous position in its history.
The occupation did not eliminate Hamas, and will not eliminate it. The martyrdom of its leaders will deepen the movement's moral and symbolic presence among the Palestinian and Arab masses, and the movement, in turn, will face internal challenges related to its organization and structure, to be reviewed and rebuilt.
However, the heavy questions of war and its repercussions will remain regarding the systematic destruction committed by the occupation in the Gaza Strip, and the genocide it inflicted on its people, which is what Hamas sought to prepare for by trying to achieve national understandings that block the way to what the occupation and the Americans call the next day, so that the next day’s decision will be made. A Palestinian decision, which means that the movement is not in the process of clinging to the rule of Gaza, but the entire matter depends on the paths of this war and its regional interactions, including any deal that may be proposed to the movement. The matter depends on the terms of this deal and the facts of the moment that determine the movement’s position on it flexibility and strictness. .
The opinions expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera Network.