Opinion | Yahya Sinwar’s Death Is a Tricky Opportunity

Reading the news that Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s pitiless leader, had been killed on Wednesday by Israeli forces in southern Gaza, I had the same sense of elation so many people felt when Osama bin Laden was killed. To take satisfaction in the violent end of another human being, even an enemy, is almost always wrong, but there are exceptions. Sinwar’s death — like bin Laden’s in 2011 or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s in 2019 or Hassan Nasrallah’s last month — is among them.

I’m not alone in the feeling — and I don’t just mean among people who share my politics. In The Times’s report on Sinwar’s death, a 22-year-old Gazan identified as Mohammed said the news marked “the best day of my life.”

“He humiliated us, started the war, scattered us and made us displaced, without water, food or money,” Mohammed said. “He is the one who made Israel do this.” Many other Gazans, perhaps a majority, undoubtedly feel the same way. It is Hamas’s reign of terror over them — which Sinwar enforced through a regime of Stasi-like domestic surveillance and extreme brutality toward anyone who questioned Hamas’s edicts or ran afoul its moral code (including for the crime of being gay) — that inhibits them from saying so out loud.

What is the challenge now? Some analysts think the main issue is whether Sinwar’s demise can facilitate a deal that frees the hostages, ends the fighting and allows reconstruction in Gaza to begin.

Unlikely. Many Israelis, most of all the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, feel they’re finally winning the war; they will want to press the military initiative in Gaza and Lebanon despite the terrible risk to the remaining hostages. Whoever next takes charge of Hamas will not want to make a conciliatory move toward Israel as his first leadership act; it could easily be his last. And the next major scene of war will probably be Israel’s much-awaited retaliatory strike on Iran. We’ll see how that plays out.

But the opportunity in Sinwar’s death and Hamas’s military evisceration is that it begins to open a space for young Gazans like Mohammed to openly and assertively reject Hamas’s brand of maximalist, fanatical, Islamist politics. Sinwar once told an Israeli intelligence officer that he would willingly lose 100,000 Palestinian civilians for the sake of freeing 100 Palestinian security prisoners. He clearly meant it and fought his side of the war accordingly. But after the last year of agony, ordinary Gazans seem less likely to be willing, if they ever were, to serve as Hamas’s human sacrifices in its quest to annihilate Israel.

How can those Gazans wrest political control from Hamas? There’s an argument that ending the war immediately and establishing a technocratic government in Gaza that doesn’t formally include Hamas could marginalize the group politically. There’s also a wishful thought (at least among right-wing Israelis) that Israel can indefinitely reoccupy the territory until it is “de-radicalized.”

The problem with the first idea is that it misunderstands how Hamas maintains its rule: not through popularity but through terror. If Hamas, however diminished, can maintain its arms, it will enforce its writ. The problem with the second is that it fails to understand how de-radicalization in a place like Gaza could work — which is not by giving Gazans a moral incentive to wage a long-running guerrilla war. If Israel tries to again put down roots in Gaza beyond maintaining control of its perimeter, it will fuel the very fire it is trying to put out.

The trick lies in finding a way between two competing imperatives: the need to continue to destroy Hamas as a force that can rule Gaza, but to do so in a way that doesn’t justify, among many Palestinians, its status as a legitimate “resistance” movement.

This could be done in various ways. Indefinite Israeli control of Gaza’s border with Egypt will help stop Hamas from rearming and give Israelis greater assurance that the territory will not again become a mortal threat. An offer of safe passage out of Gaza for Hamas fighters and their families can thin the group’s ranks. Creating well-supplied humanitarian safe zones (perhaps administered by NATO security forces) for Gazan women, children, the elderly and men who have passed a security screening can further safeguard civilians and separate them from potential combatants.

Finally, an Arab mandate for Palestine, which I first proposed back in March, could provide a long-term answer for all sides: a credible Arab-led security force in Gaza; European-led economic reconstruction; a long-term path toward a politically moderate, economically prosperous Palestinian state; closer ties between Israel and friendly Arab states. It’s always a mistake to speak of “solutions” in the Middle East, but plausible grounds for optimism can do a lot to dissolve the allure of fanaticism.

It may take the destruction of the next few layers of Hamas’s leadership to break the group’s political and military grip. But for young Gazans like Mohammed, to say nothing of so many Israelis, the belated end of Sinwar’s bloody tyranny marks the dawn of hope.

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