Israel killed Hamas leader in Gaza. What now?

Yahya Sinwar, the long-persecuted leader of the terrorist organization Hamas, is dead, killed in a shootout by Israeli soldiers in the southern Gaza Strip.

As a result, the chances of ending this years-long war – and perhaps all of Israel’s other wars in the region – are greater than ever before, at least if all leaders of the conflicting parties want to end the fighting.

Sinwar had been hiding in Hamas’s elaborate network of tunnels for most of his time since he planned and carried out the Oct. 7 invasion that killed nearly 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians – the largest number of Jews killed in a single incident Days since the invasion were killed in the Holocaust. The war it sparked killed an estimated 40,000 people in Gaza over the next year, perhaps half of them civilians, many of them women and children.

On Thursday, Israeli soldiers shot and killed three gunmen seen in a building in the southern Gaza Strip. They did not suspect that one of the gunmen was Sinwar. When the soldiers noticed that he looked a lot like the Hamas leader, they called in superiors who took the man’s DNA, fingerprints and teeth prints. Israeli officials have had such records on Sinwar since his captivity. Officials soon announced that the records matched.

Sinwar was not only the military and then political leader of Hamas, but also its personification itself, much as Saddam Hussein was the emblem of the Iraqi Baath Party and Adolf Hitler was the sworn demigod of the Nazis.

For this reason, he was Israel’s main target in this war. Can Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet now consider the killing a sufficient achievement and, whether correctly or not, tout it as a vindication of their strategy to push for a ceasefire or accept pressure from others?

In his new book WarBob Woodward quotes Brett McGurk, the Biden administration’s top Middle East envoy, as saying that Hamas political spokesmen living in Egypt or Qatar have repeatedly accepted the outlines during the endless rounds of peace talks in recent months ceasefire agreement – but Sinwar, who had the final say on such matters, rejected the proposals.

If the narrative is true, perhaps these Hamas frontmen will now come to the fore and behave like the leaders they claim to be. If they do, leaders in Egypt and other Sunni Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia, could step in and offer to rebuild Gaza and provide security at its borders, as they have sometimes offered in a postwar settlement.

And with all of that on the table, perhaps Netanyahu can have real conversations too. Hamas is not completely destroyed, but most of its leaders have been killed and most of its battalions have been severely degraded. Some polls and news reports have shown (who knows how reliably) that more than half of Palestinians in Gaza now believe the October 7 attack was a mistake. At least some are relieved that Sinwar, who brought them to war and all its misery, is dead. Could the political surrogates who supported an agreement in the peace talks take advantage of this relief?

Meanwhile, in recent weeks, Israel has driven out the top leaders of Hezbollah – the terrorist organization that has fired thousands of rockets into Israel from southern Lebanon – and is now in the process of killing their rank-and-file personnel and destroying weapons caches and alleged command centers across Lebanon, including in the capital, Beirut, forcing a million residents (about a fifth of the country’s population) to leave their homes.

Netanyahu and his defense minister Yoav Gallant say they are not finished in Lebanon. Netanyahu even released a statement warning that Lebanon would turn into a second Gaza Strip if its people did not drive out Hezbollah. It is an egregious warning for several reasons. First, Lebanon is a sovereign country and not an Israeli-occupied territory; For many years, Beirut was known as the “Paris of the Middle East.” Second, since its takeover of large parts of the country in 2002 after Israel abandoned a failed 18-year occupation, Hezbollah has infiltrated many areas of life – politics and social welfare as well as the military. For ordinary people, it is impossible to kick out the bums—at least not without extensive efforts by Arab and Western powers to rebuild the foundations of civil society and democratic government (which Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, has systematically dismantled). . In recent weeks, Nasrallah and many of his associates and future successors have been killed by Israeli airstrikes. Fighting continues, including deadly battles deep in Lebanon, but Lebanese military leaders must know that Israel has the upper hand. Perhaps they too would be open to a ceasefire if they had the power to enforce one.

There is another interesting fact. Before he was killed, Nasrallah said he would stop firing rockets into Israel if fighting in Gaza stopped. It is possible that his successors and supporters would use his words as a pretext to end a war they do not want to fight – if a ceasefire is actually reached in Gaza.

Then there is a risk of a major war between Israel and Iran. Israel has decided to retaliate in some way for Iran’s massive missile attack on Israel earlier this month. Netanyahu and his Cabinet reportedly chose the targets in consultation with President Biden, who has publicly stated he would oppose Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and said retaliation should be “proportionate.” Since the Iranian missiles targeted Israeli airfields and intelligence headquarters, these could be the types of Iranian targets that Israel strikes back at, probably with greater success.

Would it then be possible to declare this missile war over – as Israel and Iran did in April when a similar, even more one-sided exchange of fire took place? Iran’s leaders – who arm and support various anti-Israel militias in the region, including Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Houthis (collectively known as the “Axis of Resistance”) – have also spearheaded the Gaza war, at least rhetorically, to support their growing justify aggression. A ceasefire agreement could also prevent them from escalating a war they would rather not fight.

Of course, a ceasefire and a hostage-for-prisoner exchange would mark only the beginning of a process toward regional stability, including some sort of agreement that allows Israelis and Palestinians to coexist – this process will take years to materialize and could collapse along the way, just as it has collapsed many times over the last half century. But it would be a crucial first step — an end to the deadliest and riskiest war Israel has ever fought in its 76 years. Sinwar’s killing opens the door for all players in the region and their allies to do so Step.