By Jonathan Saul and James Mackenzie
JERUSALEM (Reuters) -Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was tracked by an Israeli mini drone as he lay dying in the ruins of a building in southern Gaza and filmed him slumped in a chair covered in dust, according to video released by Israeli authorities on Thursday.
As the drone hovered nearby, the video showed him throwing a stick at it, in an apparent act of desperation or defiance. Not long afterwards, the military said, a tank shell was fired into the building.
After an intensive manhunt that had lasted for more than a year, the Israeli troops that killed Sinwar were initially unaware that they had caught their country’s number one enemy after a gun battle on Wednesday, Israeli officials said.
Dental records, fingerprints and DNA testing provided final confirmation of Sinwar’s death for Israel and on Friday, Hamas confirmed their leader had been killed.
Intelligence services had been gradually restricting the area where Sinwar could operate, the military said. But unlike other militant leaders tracked down by Israel, including Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on July 13, the encounter which finally killed Sinwar was not a planned and targeted strike, or an operation carried out by elite commandos.
Instead, officials said he was found by soldiers from the Bislach Brigade, a unit that normally trains future unit commanders. The soldiers were searching an area in the Tal El Sultan area of southern Gaza on Wednesday, where they believed senior members of Hamas were located.
The troops saw three suspected militants moving between buildings, two of whom were wearing a blanket-like covering, apparently intended to hide their identities as fighters, military spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani told reporters.
The troops opened fire, leading to a gunbattle, during which one of the Palestinians was hit in the arm and one Israeli soldier was severely wounded.
As the gunbattle went on, two of the fighters went into one building and the third, who turned out later to be Sinwar, went into another where the drone was sent in to investigate.
Wary of booby traps and with evening closing in, the troops did not enter the building until the next day.
“The morning afterwards, they discovered the body and realised this could be Sinwar,” Shoshani said.
MONEY AND DOCUMENTS
When the troops reached him, his body was found with a weapon, a flak jacket and 40,000 shekels ($10,731.63) as well as various documents that suggested he was forced to shift location as the Israeli search closed around him.
“He had money on him, documents and he was on the go,” Shoshani said.
In the last months of his life, Sinwar, the main architect of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that set off the war in Gaza, appears to have stopped using telephones and other communication equipment that would have allowed Israel’s powerful intelligence services to track him down.
Israeli officials believe he was hiding in one of the vast network of tunnels that Hamas dug beneath Gaza over the past two decades.
Dozens of operations by the military and intelligence services had gradually restricted his movements to the area near the southern city of Rafah where he was finally caught, the military said.
Israeli troops had come close to catching him in Khan Younis, his home town further to the north, forcing him to leave the tunnel network where Israeli officials believe he had been sheltering for months, Shoshani said.
“We understood he fled the area, where our units were operating in Khan Younis to Rafah where he essentially became trapped,” he said.
The head of Israel’s military, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, said Israel’s pursuit of Sinwar over the past year drove him “to act like a fugitive, causing him to change locations multiple times”.
Israeli officials, who knew Sinwar as a ruthless and committed enemy, were long concerned that he had surrounded himself with some of the 101 Israeli and foreign hostages still held in Gaza as a human shield to protect himself from Israeli attacks.
But no hostages were found nearby when he was finally trapped on Wednesday, although Hagari said samples of his DNA were located in a tunnel a few hundred metres from where six Israeli hostages were executed by Hamas at the end of August.
($1 = 3.7273 shekels)
(Editing by Leslie Adler and Raju Gopalakrishnan; Editing by Sharon Singleton)
