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联系方式 Yahya Sinwar dead: Israel killed the Hamas leader in Gaza. Now what?
Yahya Sinwar, the long-pursued leader of the Hamas terrorist organization, is dead, killed in a gunfight by Israeli soldiers in southern Gaza.
As a result, the chances of ending this yearlong war—and perhaps all of Israel’s other wars in the region—are as great as they ever have been, at least if all the combatants’ leaders want to stop the fighting.
Sinwar had been hiding in Hamas’ elaborate network of tunnels for most of the time since he planned and pulled off the Oct. 7 invasion that killed nearly 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians—the largest number of Jews killed in a single day since the Holocaust. The war that he triggered has, in the year since, killed an estimated 40,000 Gazans, perhaps half of them civilians, many of them women and children.
On Thursday, Israeli soldiers fired at and killed three gunmen seen in a building in southern Gaza. They did not suspect that one of the gunmen was Sinwar. Upon noticing that he looked a lot like Hamas’ leader, the soldiers called in superiors, who took the man’s DNA, fingerprints, and dental impressions. Israeli officials had such records for Sinwar from the time he was a prisoner. Officials soon after announced that the records were a match.
Sinwar was not just the military and ultimately the political leader of Hamas, but also its very personification, in much the same way that Saddam Hussein was the emblem of Iraq’s Baath Party and Adolf Hitler was the sworn-to demigod of the Nazis.
AdvertisementFor that reason, he has been Israel’s main target in this war. Can Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Cabinet take the killing as enough of an accomplishment—touting it, whether altogether correctly or not, as vindication of their strategy—to now press, or accept pressure from others, for a cease-fire?
Advertisement Advertisement AdvertisementIn his new book War, Bob Woodward quotes Brett McGurk, the Biden administration’s main Middle East envoy, as saying that, several times during the endless rounds of peace talks in these past several months, Hamas’ political spokesmen, who live in Egypt or Qatar, accepted the outlines of a cease-fire deal—but Sinwar, who had ultimate say over such matters, rejected the proposals.
If that account is true, maybe those Hamas front men will now step to the fore and act like the leaders they claim to be. If they do, the leaders in Egypt and other Sunni Arab nations, most notably Saudi Arabia, might step up and offer to rebuild Gaza and provide security along its borders, as they have sometimes offered to do in a postwar settlement.
AdvertisementAnd if all that seems on the table, maybe Netanyahu can engage in genuine talks as well. Hamas isn’t completely destroyed, but most of its leaders have been killed, and most of its battalions have been seriously degraded. Some polls and news stories have reported (who knows how authoritatively) that more than half of Gazan Palestinians now think the Oct. 7 attack was a mistake. At least some are relieved that Sinwar, who got them into the war and all its misery, is dead. Might the political stand-ins, who supported a deal in the peace talks, play on that relief?
Meanwhile, in recent weeks, Israel has taken out the top leaders of Hezbollah—the terrorist organization that has fired thousands of rockets against Israel from southern Lebanon—and is now in the process of killing its rank-and-file personnel and destroying weapons caches and alleged command centers throughout Lebanon, including in its capital, Beirut, forcing 1 million residents (about one-fifth of the country’s population) to flee their homes.
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Read MoreNetanyahu and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, say they’re not finished in Lebanon. Netanyahu even released a statement warning to turn Lebanon into another Gaza if its people didn’t throw out Hezbollah. It’s an outrageous warning for several reasons. First, Lebanon is a sovereign country, not Israeli-occupied territory; for many years, Beirut was known as the “Paris of the Middle East.” Second, since it took over swaths of the country in 2002, after Israel abandoned a failed 18-year-long occupation, Hezbollah has infiltrated many realms of life: politics and social welfare, as well as the military. For normal people to throw the bums out is impossible—at least not without a full-fledged effort, by Arab and Western powers, to rebuild the rudiments of a civil society and a democratic government (which Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, systematically dismantled). In the past few weeks, Israeli airstrikes have killed Nasrallah and many of his aides and successors-in-waiting. Fighting continues, including deadly battles deep into Lebanon, but Lebanon’s military leaders must know that Israel has the upper hand. Maybe they too would be open to a cease-fire, if they have the power to enforce one.
Advertisement Advertisement AdvertisementThere is another intriguing fact. Before he was killed, Nasrallah said he would stop firing rockets into Israel if the fighting stopped in Gaza. It is possible that his successors and acolytes would cite his words as an excuse to end a war they don’t want to fight—if a cease-fire in Gaza is actually reached.
Then there is the danger of a wider war between Israel and Iran. Israel has decided to retaliate in some way to Iran’s massive missile attack on Israel earlier this month. Netanyahu and his Cabinet have reportedly chosen the targets, in consultation with President Joe Biden, who has publicly said he would oppose Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, insisting that the retaliation be “proportional.” Since Iran’s missiles were aimed at Israeli airfields and intelligence headquarters, those may be the sorts of Iranian targets that Israeli strikes back at—probably with greater success.
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Then might it be possible to declare that this missile war is over, just as Israel and Iran did back in April, when a similar, even more lopsided exchange of fire took place? Iran’s leaders—who arm and assist various anti-Israel militias in the region, including Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Houthis (known, together, as the “axis of resistance”)—have also cited the Gaza war, at least rhetorically, to justify their growing aggression. A cease-fire deal might also save them from escalating a war they’d rather not fight.
AdvertisementOf course, a cease-fire and a hostage-for-prisoner exchange would mark only the beginning of a process toward regional stability, including some sort of arrangement that allows Israelis and Palestinians to coexist—an operation that will take years to work out and that could break down along the way, just as it has broken down many times in the past half-century. But it would be a vital first step—an end to the deadliest, riskiest war that Israel has ever fought in its 76-year existence. Sinwar’s killing opens the door, for all the players in the region and their allies, to take that step.
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