How Yahya Sinwar’s death will change the Middle East

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. IN THE END Yahya Sinwar died brutally in the rubble of Gaza, like tens of thousands of victims of the war he unleashed a year earlier. In a firefight with an Israeli patrol in southern Gaza, the leader of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement, was killed on October 17th.

The massacre a year earlier that he masterminded altered the trajectory of the Middle East, although not in the way he dreamed of. His surprise death will shake the region’s destiny again, leaving Hamas leaderless, Gaza without any semblance of governance and Israel able to claim that a key war aim has been met at last and at a huge cost in lives. All this raises the previously slim possibility of a ceasefire and hostage release in Gaza.

And if that takes place there is a narrow pathway to a de-escalation across the region even as a war rages in Lebanon and the prospect of Israeli retaliation against Iranian missile strikes looms large. Read all our coverage of the war in the Middle East Mr Sinwar, aged 61, spent years planning the attack on October 7th 2023 in which thousands of Hamas fighters caught Israel by surprise, bursting through the Gaza border and killing nearly 1,200 and taking back 250 hostages. Since then he had been in hiding, lurking underground in a labyrinth of tunnels, communicating with his minions through hand-written notes and runners, and eschewing mobile-phones which could be tracked.