Sinwar is dead: the architect of October 7 and the war's open question

Yahya Sinwar is dead, killed in a firefight in southern Gaza on 16 October, his body identified by dental records and DNA, the confirmation delivered by the Israeli military on the evening of the 17th. The death of the man who planned the October 7 attack, who spent years in Israeli prisons learning Hebrew and the language of his captors, who returned to Gaza to build the organisation that would carry out the worst day in Israel’s history, was announced as a triumph by a government that had been waiting for the news for more than a year. The prime minister called it the beginning of the end; the president of the United States called it a good day; and the families of the hostages, who had hoped that Sinwar might become the currency of a deal, watched the celebrations with a different set of feelings.

The details of the killing were almost anticlimactic. The soldiers who encountered him were not on a mission to find him; they were patrolling in the ruins of Rafah, and the firefight with a small group of fighters left a body in a building, unrecognised until the unit returned to check. The most wanted man in the war died in a chance engagement, surrounded not by his bodyguards but by rubble, a detail that the Israeli press noted with satisfaction and the war’s chroniclers will note with irony. The death of the leader who had spent the war in the tunnels, releasing messages from underground, was the death of a man the war had already made invisible.

His death changes the war’s arithmetic without changing its course. The military campaign against Hamas has killed the leadership that planned 7 October: the commanders of the brigades, the masterminds of the attack, and now the man who oversaw it all. And yet the war continues, the hostages remain in tunnels, the negotiations that Sinwar’s death was supposed to unblock have not been revived, and the Israeli government has given no sign that the destruction of the leadership will satisfy its declared goal of destroying Hamas as an organisation. The celebration of the killing, in the streets and the studios of Israel, was real; the strategic meaning of the killing remains the war’s open question.

The succession was settled within days, the deputy and the politburo confirming the transition to the leadership that had been operating in Sinwar’s shadow, the strategy unchanged, the demands unchanged. The war, which the death was meant to advance toward its end, was at the moment of the announcement approaching the anniversary of the hostage deal that never came, and the families in Tel Aviv who have campaigned for a year for the return of the living and the dead continued their vigils through the celebration.

The killing of the architect is the killing of the war’s symbol, and the symbolism is the point that cuts both ways. For the government, the death is the proof that the war’s logic is working, that the hunt ends in the tunnels, that the justice of the state can reach its enemies. For the critics, the death is the proof that the logic is exhausted, that the war can kill every architect and still not end, still not bring the hostages home, still not answer the question of what the day after will be. Both readings were on display in the week of the announcement, and the war, which has outlived its planners, will provide the evidence for whichever reading proves true.