
It may take weeks to confirm if Muhammad Sinwar was killed in air strike on Khan Younis hospital
It may take days, or even weeks, before the death of Muhammad Sinwar can be confirmed, but Israeli defence officials believe that everyone who was present in what they say was an underground compound targeted in Tuesday night's air strikes beneath the Khan Younis European Hospital is dead. 'If Sinwar was there he was killed,' said an Israeli source.
The air strikes were approved by prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, defence minister Yisrael Katz and Israel Defense Forces chief-of staff Lieut Gen Eyal Zamir in 'real time' in response to an 'immediate opportunity that had emerged', once it was established that there were no hostages in the vicinity, defence officials said. The urgency of the strike left no time to inform the United States in advance despite the 'sensitivity' stemming from President Donald Trump's visit to
Saudi Arabia
.
Muhammad Sinwar, the 49-year-old younger brother of Yahya Sinwar – the Hamas leader killed by Israel in October – is considered one of the architects of the October 7th, 2023, attack on southern Israel. He is the senior figure in Hamas's military wing and had, in the months following his brother's assassination, in effect taken over Hamas's leadership, Israeli security officials believe.
In the past he served as the commander of Hamas's Khan Younis brigade and masterminded the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier seized on the Gaza border in 2006, who was subsequently released for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, including Yahya Sinwar.
READ MORE
Muhammad Sinwar is considered a charismatic leader but also has a reputation for brutality and ruthlessness, and was widely feared across Gaza. He has survived numerous Israeli attempts on his life, and Israel offered a $300,000 reward for information leading to his whereabouts. He is rarely seen in public in recent years, even avoiding his father's funeral in 2022.
If Sinwar's death is confirmed it means that only a handful of senior officials in Hamas's military wing in Gaza remain alive. However, Hamas still exists as an organisation, and its radical Islamist ideology, based on the teachings of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, has deep roots among the Gazan population.
Israel considers Muhammad Sinwar the chief obstacle to a new ceasefire and hostage-release deal, taking as he did a more hardline position than the Hamas leadership in exile and his subordinates in Gaza.
There was much speculation on Wednesday that Sinwar's possible death might makes it easier for Hamas negotiators to show increased flexibility, facilitating a new ceasefire deal, as proximity negotiations resumed in Doha after months of deadlock, with Trump making it clear his patience is running out. Significant progress in the talks, combined with US pressure on Israel, could also lead to a delay or cancelling of Israel's planned military escalation aimed at conquering the entire Gaza Strip.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Irish Independent
6 hours ago
- Irish Independent
Ishaan Tharoor: Destruction of Gaza has brought Europe to point of no return in dealing with Israel
Continued support for Netanyahu's regime hurts EU's credibility in efforts to end war in Ukraine, French leader says ©Washington Post Today at 21:30 Far from European capitals and the ruins of the Gaza Strip, France's leader still found cause to criticise Israel. Emmanuel Macron opened his speech at a recent Asian security forum in Singapore with a warning about 'double standards' in international politics. European entreaties over the war in Ukraine and the need for global solidarity against Russia's invasion, he said, were hurt by the West's continued support of Israel's campaign against Palestinian militant group Hamas.


Irish Examiner
7 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
Sarah Harte: The Government cannot continue to pay lip service to atrocities in Gaza
There are many other conflicts in the world, such as the humanitarian catastrophe in Sudan. Yet, we find commonalities in our shared history with the Palestinians. This can be linked to what Fintan Drury, in his new book, Catastrophe Nakba II, terms us being 'indelibly marked by the experience of being colonised by Britain'. The folk memory of the famine that transformed Ireland lives on, when entire communities were wiped out, which perhaps heightens our reaction to the current famine in Gaza, including the nightly images of emaciated children and starving babies. As TCD academic Brendan Ciarán Browne has written, blockaded humanitarian aid trucks waiting to get into Gaza should remind us of British colonial ships laden with crops and livestock departing our shores while our ancestors at home starved. So, we, the Irish people, empathise with the Palestinians. Still, as international agencies operating in Gaza have run out of superlatives to describe the hell there, hard questions are being asked of many European governments, including our own. The Germans are struggling with reconciling the genocidal ideology that paved the way for the mass genocide of European Jews, and their response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Many German Jewish writers have objected to the conflation of antisemitism and criticism of Israel (as have scores of intellectual Jewish thinkers), and they have suffered as a result, including being defunded and not awarded literary prizes. Small potatoes, you say, but not if it's your livelihood. In that situation, the moral luxury of commenting becomes costly. Spare a thought for the many Jewish people, who abhor the genocide in Palestine. To ever escape a cycle of violence necessitates acknowledging suffering on 'the other side'. What must that be like, go to bed, turn off the light, and be left trying to square the outsized tragedy of your past, the visceral fear the Hamas attack on October 7 provoked, with knowledge of the massacre and famine in Gaza supposedly carried out in your name? Tide may be turning in Germany The tide may finally be turning in Germany. Last week, its foreign minister Johann Wadephul warned that the fight 'against antisemitism…and full support for….the state of Israel must not be instrumentalised for the conflict and the warfare currently being waged in the Gaza Strip'. He said they are thinking carefully about what 'further steps to take'. They need to hurry up. Of course, many Western countries persist in seeing only what they want to see about the current phase of the Zionist mission. A question that must be posed to the Irish Government is what concrete steps they are going to take to object to the complete annihilation of the Palestinian people? Omar Shaban is the founder of Palthink for Strategic Studies and a senior analyst and development expert with extensive experience in Palestine. Mr Shaban has led humanitarian and emergency programmes for Catholic Relief Services in Gaza for 10 years and worked with UNRWA for another 10. He was born and lives in Gaza. Mr Shaban suggests that the Irish Government request that EU states stop supplying arms to the Israeli military. The Social Democrats in Germany have just called for the German arms exports to Israel to be halted to avoid German complicity in war crimes. Germany is the second-largest weapons supplier to Israel after the US. He asks that the Irish Government work to pressure Israel to open the Rafah crossing with Egypt to allow patients, injured children and their families to be evacuated. It doesn't seem like a lot to ask. He advocates that Ireland works closely with other EU states that share the same position to declare a clear joint statement asking Israel to stop the war immediately and to allow the flow of aid through international organisations such as UNRWA and WFP. This statement should include an ultimatum that if Israel doesn't do this, then the EU will impose trade sanctions. The EU can suspend sections of the EU-Israel Trade Agreement under Article 2. According to European Commission statistics, the EU is Israel's biggest trading partner. Some 34.2% of Israel's imports came from the EU, while 28.8% of the country's exports went to the EU. Of course, practically, that leaves our government with a problem. As reported in The Irish Examiner last week, Ireland is Israel's second-largest trading partner. Israel's exports to Ireland have exploded since 2021. As Patrick Bresnihan and Patrick Brodie exposed, for all our performative statements, meaningful sanctions on the Israeli economy would jeopardise our economic position. As reported, the vast majority of what we are buying are 'electronic integrated circuits and microassemblies,' mainly used in tech and pharmaceutical manufacturing. Ambassador Adel Atieh, who lives in Ramallah, is the director of the European Affairs Department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Palestine. He suggests that if the EU Council fails to take responsibility for reviewing the EU-Israel association agreement, and if the European Commission continues to neglect its legal obligations regarding agreements with Israel, Ireland should consider asking the European Court of Justice to investigate and provide a legal opinion. Furthermore, Ireland should issue a public warning to settlers holding Irish citizenship, urging them to withdraw immediately from settlements due to their involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity. Mr Atieh says that this stance could encourage other EU member states to adopt similar positions, potentially leading to the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of settlers from the West Bank. This month, the UN General Assembly will vote on granting Palestine full membership status. Even if a US veto blocks Palestinian statehood at the Security Council, the General Assembly retains a critical pathway through the 'Uniting for Peace' resolution. This mechanism allows the Assembly to convene an emergency session when the Council fails to act due to a veto, and to recommend collective measures. Our Government must exert public pressure on other countries to accede to this. Silence of Irish professional bodies Back home on Irish soil, the questions for our government extend to professional medical bodies, including the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) and the Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA). The management of their relationships with Israeli counterparts and their deafening silence in calling out the genocide, as I've written before, raises serious questions about them. Dr Angela Skuse, a GP working in Inclusion Health in Dublin with homeless people, says none of the Irish medical organisations have issued a statement that includes the words 'genocide' or 'Israel'. Any statements issued have been careful not to 'take sides', and as Dr Skuse said, could equally refer to a natural disaster. 'Why is the medical profession so silent? Doctors are one of the most trusted professions. If we won't speak out and say that it's wrong, that it's a genocide and Israel is committing it — who will?' She adds that hundreds of healthcare workers have been murdered. Trinity College has just ended academic co-operation with Israeli institutions. The medical organisations should follow its lead and expel Israel from the World Health Organization and the World Medical Association. Ultimately, it will never be enough for the Irish Government (or professional bodies) to mouth support for international law from the sidelines. If we do nothing concrete, we engage in a problematic form of empathy or virtue signalling. Just as many Jewish people have the hardest of choices about whether to speak up, we and other Europeans are presented with choices too. The question is, what choices will our Government make in our name?


RTÉ News
8 hours ago
- RTÉ News
Thunberg returned to Sweden after deportation from Israel
Activist Greta Thunberg returned home to Sweden after being deported from Israel, lambasting the country for its "violations of international law and war crimes" in Gaza. Ms Thunberg was deported after Israeli security forces intercepted a boat carrying her and 11 other activists attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza and break the Israeli blockade on the Palestinian territory. The 22-year-old was greeted by around 30 cheering supporters waving Palestinian flags amid a large media presence at Stockholm's Arlanda airport, after landing just after 10.30pm local time (9.30pm Irish time), an AFP journalist reported. Earlier, during a stopover in Paris, Ms Thunberg accused Israel of "kidnapping" her and the other activists. Asked in Sweden if she was scared when the security forces boarded the Madleen sailboat, Ms Thunberg replied: "What I'm afraid of is that people are silent during an ongoing genocide". "What I feel most is concern for the continued violations of international law and war crimes that Israel is guilty of," Ms Thunberg told reporters. She accused Israel of carrying out a "systematic genocide" and "systematic starvation of over two million people" in Gaza. Several rights groups including Amnesty International have accused Israel of genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza but Israel vehemently rejects the term. "We must act, we must demand that our government acts, and we must act ourselves when our complicit governments do not step up," Ms Thunberg said. She rose to fame as a schoolgirl activist against climate change and seeks to avoid flying because of its environmental impact, going so far as to cross the Atlantic by sailboat twice. She appeared confused about reporters' questions about how it felt to travel by plane, replying, "Why are you asking about that?" Of the 12 people on board the Madleen carrying food and supplies for Gaza, eight were taken into custody after they refused to leave Israel voluntarily. Four others, including Ms Thunberg, were deported. All of them have been banned from Israel for 100 years, according to the rights group that legally represents some of them. The 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel that triggered the war resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official figures. The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says at least 54,981 people, the majority civilians, have been killed in the territory since the start of the war. The UN considers these figures reliable. Out of 251 taken hostage during the Hamas attack, 54 are still held in Gaza including 32 the Israeli military says are dead.