Diminished, wounded and half-crumpled in a sofa chair amidst the rubble of a Gaza living room, Yahya Sinwar had time to take in the reality of his final moments alive.
Drone footage taken by Israeli forces shows the Hamas leader's final act of defiance was the forlorn flinging of a random stick at the buzzing machine. He missed.
A short time later Israel killed the man at the top of its most-wanted list; the terrorist who masterminded the atrocities of October 7, 2023 in the hope it would unleash a regional "flood" of devastation against the hated Zionist state.
While the conflict is not over, Sinwar's decision to send thousands of Hamas fighters into Israel now looks like one of the greatest miscalculations of our time.
It has wrought, 1. untold civilian deaths in Israel, 2. on his own people in Gaza 3. and now Lebanon. 4. It blooded a new generation in an age-old battle.
But more significantly, the stunning news of Sinwar's death has delivered a palpable sense of an inflection point reached.
It allows for the possibility, difficult to stomach given the costs that led to this point, that the human agonies of the past 12 months might now give way to something more hopeful.
