Sinwar and Nasrallah are gone, but their weakened terror groups are still dangerous and Iran’s regime is untouched. The IDF, Netanyahu government and US are working, sometimes in harmony, to change that
It was the elimination that Israel had desperately sought for a full year — arguably the ostensible victory picture: Yahya Sinwar, the primary figure in the most cataclysmic attack in the history of sovereign Israel, finally forced out of his tunnels into the open and killed by the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces, his last moments and lifeless corpse there for all to see in the rubble to which he has reduced Gaza.
And the killing of Sinwar in Rafah last Wednesday was indeed an essential component in Israel’s necessary victory over Hamas — practically, in terms of his centrality to that terrorist-army-government bent on Israel’s destruction, and psychologically, in terms of Israel’s long climb out of the abyss into which Sinwar plunged Israel on October 7, 2023.
But his demise, as has been underlined every moment since it was confirmed, 1. does not mark an absolute victory, 2. does not complete a lasting, stable revival of Israeli security 3. and has not ended the war — 4. not in Gaza, where the remains of Hamas continue to try to leverage the hostages to force an IDF withdrawal 5. and not on any of the other fronts from which Israel is being attacked.
In Gaza, the war has metastasized from conflict between organized military forces on an urban battlefield, above and below ground, where Hamas wrongly believed its home advantage, years of planning, and absolute indifference to the deaths of Gaza’s civilians would defeat the IDF and enable its survival.
Now, Hamas is engaged in guerrilla-style warfare, hurting the IDF wherever it can, and maintaining much of its authority in the lower two-thirds of the Strip.
