Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar killed in Israeli strike on Rafah

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was killed in the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip, Sky News Arabia reports citing sources.

Photo: Israel Defense Forces is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Israeli source Channel 12 also confirmed Sinwar's death, The Times of Israel writes.

According to Channel 12, the Israeli military did not know that Sinwar was staying in the building that they intended to attack. When they entered the building after the attack, they found the body of a man who looked like the Hamas leader.

The body has not yet been delivered to Israel for identification, as the area where the attack was carried out is full of mines and traps.

Earlier, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reported the possible elimination of Yahya Sinwar. According to them, three Palestinian militants were killed, and their identities were still being established.

The dead were found to be carrying banknotes and fake IDs, Kan publication reports. It will be easy to identify Sinwar, as he had been to an Israeli prison, so the Israeli authorities have his DNA.

Yahya Sinwar, 61, was one of the founders of Hamas. He chaired the organization's politburo in August. The Guardian called him one of the main organizers of last year's October 7 attack on Israel. Sinwar spent more than 20 years in Israeli prisons and was released in 2011 during a prisoner swap.

Sinwar replaced Ismail Haniyeh as the head of the group's politburo. Haniyeh died in late July in an explosion at his residence in Tehran, where he arrived for the inauguration of new president Masoud Pezeshkian.

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Yahya Ibrahim Hassan Sinwar, commonly known as Yahya Sinwar, is the de facto leader of Hamas. A Palestinian politician, he has been the chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau since August 2024 and the Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip since February 2017, succeeding Ismail Haniyeh in both roles. Sinwar was born in the Khan Yunis refugee camp in Egyptian-ruled Gaza in 1962 to a family, who had been expelled or fled from Ashkelon during the 1948 Palestine War. He finished his studies at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he received a bachelor's degree in Arabic Studies. For orchestrating the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians he considered to be collaborators in 1989, Sinwar was sentenced to four life sentences by Israel, of which he served 22 years until his release among 1,026 others in a 2011 prisoner exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Sinwar was one of the co-founders of the security apparatus of Hamas.