Extracts: Why Sinwar’s ‘warrior death’ will win him martyr status in Gaza and beyond Intrigue surrounds the Hamas leader’s defiant final moments but an exalted afterlife as Palestine’s champion now seems certain
The discrepancy in the official Israeli account of Yahya Sinwar’s final moments has emerged since his death which appears likely to add fuel to the martyr’s cult fast developing around the Hamas leader
The Israeli autopsy carried out on Sinwar concluded that he died from a gunshot wound to his head, at odds with the initial Israel Defense Forces (IDF) version which implied he was killed by a tank shell fired into the wrecked building where he made his last stand
The IDF released footage of a tank firing at the building in Rafah’s Tel al-Sultan refugee camp and the military spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, said: “We identified him as a terrorist inside a building, fired at the building and then went in to search”
However, according to Chen Kugel, the director of Israel’s national forensic institute, who carried out the autopsy, the cause of death was a bullet wound to the head
In an interview with the New York Times, Kugel did not speculate on who fired the fatal shot, 1. whether it was during a skirmish with Israeli soldiers before the tank round was fired or 2. after he was found in the rubble of the building or 3. by Sinwar himself so as not to be taken alive
Sinwar had a pistol with him, which some Israeli reports said had previously belonged to an IDF military intelligence officer, Mahmoud Hir a-Din, a Druze from the Galilee region who was killed during a secret mission in Gaza in 2018
The intrigue surrounding Sinwar’s death has fuelled a martyr’s cult that spread explosively across social media from the moment the Hamas leader was confirmed dead
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The fact that Sinwar was killed in combat fatigues and a combat vest after firing and hurling grenades at Israeli soldiers even lashing out at an IDF drone with a wooden baton thrown with his one remaining working arm in a final gesture of defiance, sets Sinwar apart from his predecessors who were assassinated while they were on the run
Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin 2004 killing
When the long-serving Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was assassinated by missiles fired by an IDF helicopter gunship in 2004 he was being pushed along in a wheelchair after prayers in a Gaza mosque
There was little of his body left to photograph but imagined pictures of the fatal missile strike became part of the iconography which almost instantly appeared on walls across the occupied territories, along with images of the white-bearded leader ascending to heaven
Pictures of Yassin are still common in Gaza and the West Bank, often showing him in the company of more recent martyrs
