Israeli officials say they are closing in on Yehiya Sinwar, the accused architect of the Oct. 7 attacks. Whether his death would help end the war is up for debate.
This image grab from a video released by the Israeli army on Feb. 13 shows what the army says is Hamas's chief in Gaza, Yehiya Sinwar, walking in a tunnel along with other people in the Gaza Strip. Israel's army said the video was filmed Oct. 10. leader Yehiya Sinwar, the alleged architect of the Oct. 7 attacks, is hiding inside a labyrinthine network of tunnels beneath southern Gaza.
On Oct. 7, Hamas kidnapped more than 250 civilians and soldiers from Israel and took them into Gaza, officials have said. Hamas hasmore than 100 of them. About 130 hostages remain in captivity, an estimate that includes the bodies of about two dozen people who Israeli authorities determined have died. About half a dozen of the remaining hostages are Americans.
Paired with interrogations of captured Hamas fighters, the information Israeli forces found underground has helped them further understand the tunnel routes. U.S. intelligence analysts are helping with some of that tunnel mapping, contributing powerful analytic technologies that fuse fragments of information, according to officials with knowledge of the work.
Public attention on Sinwar’s whereabouts, and his fate, was reignited on Feb. 13, when the Israel Defense Forces released what it said was security camera footage of Sinwar inside a tunnel beneath Khan Younis, the city where officials believe Sinwar is now located.
Killing Sinwar would be a huge strategic and symbolic victory for Israel. But some experts question whether eliminating a single leader will bring the government closer to Netanyahu’s stated goal of totally destroying Hamas, which critics say is an ill-defined and unrealistic objective.“Killing Sinwar would be exercising pure justice. In fact, he deserves to die more than once,” said Alon Pinkas, a veteran Israeli diplomat and former senior-level adviser.
Israeli and U.S. officials have offered differing accounts of how many Hamas fighters Israeli forces have killed and how many brigades have been neutralized. An anticipated operation against the southern city of Rafah, on the border with Egypt, is widely seen as a final push by the Israeli military to destroy Hamas’s remaining organized groups of fighters.
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