Israeli military checking reports that Hamas leader Sinwar is dead

The Israeli military said Thursday it was checking whether its forces had killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the alleged mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack that killed 1,200 Israelis and captured 250 as hostages.

If confirmed, Sinwar’s killing would be the culmination of a yearlong hunt — involving Israeli and American spy agencies — for the Palestinian leader, who was believed to be hiding in Hamas’ underground network of tunnels in Gaza.

Sinwar became Hamas’ political head after the August assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, which was widely attributed to Israel.

Israel’s military and the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, released a joint statement Thursday saying “three terrorists were eliminated” during operations in the Gaza Strip. The statement added that it was checking the identity of one of the militants.

The remains of the killed militant are reported to be undergoing DNA testing; samples will be compared to Sinwar’s DNA collected during his long incarceration in an Israeli jail.

There was no immediate comment from Hamas.

If confirmed, Sinwar’s demise could provide an opening for a negotiated end to the war in Gaza, which has killed about 42,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, triggered an enormous humanitarian crisis and left much of the seaside territory in ruins.

Israel has said its war aims are freeing hostages and the destruction of Hamas — a goal that many regard as unrealistic, although the organization has been seriously degraded militarily over the past year.

Israeli media quoted sources in Israel’s security establishment as saying there was a “high chance” that Sinwar had been killed.

The initial statement from the Israeli military and the Shin Bet security agency said there was no sign that any Israeli hostages were in the area. Of the hostages captured by Hamas-led attackers in southern Israel, fewer than 70 are thought to remain alive in Gaza.

If one of the dead is indeed Sinwar, it appeared that the killing — unlike a string of assassinations carried out by Israel in the course of the current conflict — was not a deliberate targeting. Israeli media reports said there was no prior intelligence suggesting the Hamas leader’s presence in the area.

U.S. intelligence officials had been working closely with Israel to locate Sinwar as well as hostages. But there was no immediate indication that U.S. information led to this killing, the State Department said.

Sinwar, born in 1962, was a native of the Khan Yunis refugee camp in Gaza. His involvement with Hamas dated to the late 1980s, soon after the militant group was first formed. He made his name in the organization as a brutal internal enforcer, rooting out suspected spies and collaborators with Israel.

Sentenced in 1989 to four life sentences for the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers and a number of Palestinians he suspected of collaboration, Sinwar served 22 years in Israeli prison.

In prison, Sinwar became fluent in Hebrew and proved an astute observer of Israeli politics. He survived a bout with brain cancer — his symptoms first spotted by a prison dentist, with his subsequent successful treatment carried out in Israel.

His jailhouse interrogators — interviewed often in Israeli media about their experiences with him — described a figure who was intellectually curious, utterly ruthless and unyielding in his belief that Israel must be destroyed.

He was released in a lopsided 2011 prisoner exchange, in which 1,000 Palestinians were freed from Israeli jails in exchange for a single Israeli soldier who had been captured and held in Gaza.

That Sinwar survived this long was a source of huge frustration for Israel, whose intelligence services in the past have proved lethally adept at targeting other leaders of Hamas and other Iranian-backed proxy groups such as Hezbollah.

A July airstrike in Gaza killed Sinwar’s top deputy, Mohammed Deif, only a day after Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran.

Sinwar proved prescient in his mistrust of any electronic devices — which were used as a devastating weapon last month against operatives of Hezbollah.

Sinwar relied instead on a tight and secretive network of couriers who hand-relayed messages to him, and conveyed his responses.

While that clandestine mode of communication undoubtedly helped keep Sinwar alive over the months of intense Israeli attacks on Gaza — and as he was being hunted by U.S. and Israeli intelligence — it also built long delays into negotiations taking place over a number of months, when the United States, intermediaries such as Egypt and Qatar, as well as Sinwar’s own allies, awaited his response.