Benjamin Netanyahu says Mohammad Sinwar is dead. Here's how that could reshape the war in Gaza

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4 days ago

Mohammad Sinwar — the man the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) says heads up the armed wing of the Hamas terror group and was once tipped to become the organisation's next commander — is dead, according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Mr Netanyahu briefly mentioned Sinwar's killing in a speech delivered at the Israeli Knesset on Wednesday, in which he also listed the names of other top Hamas leaders killed during the war.
Mr Netanyahu did not elaborate on the nature of Sinwar's death, however Israeli media had previously reported that he was the target of an IDF strike on May 13 that the military said hit a Hamas command centre beneath the European Hospital in Gaza's Khan Younis.
Khan Younis, north of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, is also the place Sinwar was born and lived.
The prime minister's address on Wednesday was not the first time he had suggested Sinwar had died because of IDF strikes. On May 21, he suggested Sinwar had "probably" been killed.
The IDF has not yet formally commented on whether Sinwar was targeted or killed in that strike. At the time, Palestinian health authorities said at least 16 people had been killed and more than 70 others injured in the strike.
Hamas is also yet to confirm the reports of Sinwar's death.
Analysts told the ABC in October that Sinwar stood a chance of being installed as the next Hamas leader, after the death of his brother Yahya in another IDF strike.
So, if he has been killed, where could that leave Hamas and the war with Israel in Gaza?
He was born in 1975 in a refugee camp in Khan Younis, and the IDF claims he leads Hamas's paramilitary wing known as the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades.
Sinwar was installed in that position after the death of the brigades' previous leader, Mohammad Deif, who was killed in an IDF air strike on July 13, 2024.
The new brigades leader is the younger brother of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who helped mastermind the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that sparked the war in Gaza.
His family was among hundreds of thousands of Palestinians driven from what is now modern-day Israel during the 1948 war surrounding the country's creation.
The younger Sinwar joined Hamas after it was founded in the late 1980s as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and rose through the ranks to become a member of its so-called joint chiefs of staff.
He was also one of the planners of a 2006 cross-border attack on an Israeli army post in which militants captured Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit, who was held for five years and later exchanged for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including Yahya Sinwar.
In an interview with Qatar's Al Jazeera TV aired three years ago, Mohammed Sinwar said that when Hamas threatens Israel, "we know how to specify the location that hurts the occupation and how to press them."
While Mr Netanyahu is now openly saying Sinwar is dead, there has not yet been any official confirmation that he was killed in any IDF strike on Gaza.
Conflicting reports of his death also date back as far as 2014, when the IDF said that he had been killed in a strike on a residential complex during a seven-week aerial attack against Hamas.
Nine years later, an Israeli military raid on a Hamas training compound on November 10, 2023, found military documents in offices that they said belonged to the Sinwar brothers — suggesting the younger brother was still alive.
A month later, a video was released online by the Israeli army which it said showed Sinwar alive and travelling in a car through a tunnel near the Erez crossing, at the northern border between Gaza and Israel.
Since then, the IDF has been actively hunting Sinwar as part of its operations in Gaza to eliminate the executive branches of Hamas.
As the head of Hamas's armed wing, Sinwar would have had the final word on any agreement to release Israeli hostages, and his death could further complicate ongoing US and Arab efforts to broker a ceasefire.
Israel has vowed to continue the war until all the hostages are returned and Hamas has been either defeated or disarmed and sent into exile.
In October, Strategic Analysis Australia's international relations analyst Michael Shoebridge told the ABC that IDF claims of Yahya Sinwar's death had cleared the way for his younger brother Mohammad to become Hamas's next commander.
He also said that if the younger Sinwar was to begin leading the terror organisation, it would mean a continuation of "an increasingly apocalyptic war" against Israel and the ongoing "suffering of the Gazan population".
Now, Mr Shoebridge says that reports of his death reflect a wider push by the Netanyahu government to eliminate Hamas.
"The IDF has been dismantling Hamas as an organisation, mainly from the top down, but also with a lot of its stockpiles of weapons and manufacturing sites, and a lot of its street-level fighters since the 8th of October, [2023]," he said.
"It's now killed such a number of the original senior leadership and the next levels down that Hamas will need to entirely rebuild itself as an organisation.
"It's been put into a complete disarray and disassembled from the top down to an incredible degree."
If Hamas were to be destroyed, it could be replaced by another grassroots Gazan organisation that is equally as opposed to Israeli control, Mr Shoebridge said.
"When there's been a conflict with the level of violence that we've seen here … new recruits get motivated by the suffering of themselves, their families and friends," he said.
"We could see another organisation that we don't even know the name of emerge and start to take control in Gaza.
ABC/Wires