The question now is whether Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has enough strategic and moral sense to leverage its military wins into a plausible vision of peace.
In 2021, Israel bombed Gaza for 11 days in a campaign known as Operation Guardian of the Walls. At the end of the battle, Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza, posed for a photograph in broad daylight. Surrounded by rubble, he sat in an armchair. On his face, he wore a defiant smile.
Sinwar—obsessed with operational security, paranoid about Israeli collaborators in his midst—possessed a genius for survival that inflicted death on his own people. For more than a year since October 7, 2023, he eluded the Israeli Defense Forces as they flooded his tunnels, detonated the passages for his escape, and flattened plausible hiding places. Sinwar’s survival was a haunting nightmare. The prospect of the architect of October 7 posing again, with that wicked smirk, was justification for continuing the war.
That he will never smile again means that Israel has achieved a comprehensive military victory in Gaza, albeit at a terrible cost to civilians and to its own reputation. The Hamas hierarchy that unleashed October 7 has been eliminated. The smuggling tunnels that funneled Iranian-supplied arms from Egypt have been destroyed. The rank-and-file soldiers of the terror army have been decimated. Israel’s only remaining significant objective is the release of its hostages.
The question now is whether Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has enough strategic and moral sense to leverage its military wins into a plausible vision of peace. But before fretting about the future, it’s worth celebrating the fact that one of history’s monsters has met the fate that he deserved.
A suicide bomber destroys himself. Yahya Sinwar strapped the entirety of Gaza to his body. When he unleashed the pogrom of October 7, he did so with the full knowledge that he was provoking a shattering Israeli retaliation. Cutting the border fence and inciting a barbaric orgy of murder, rape, and kidnapping was sure to culminate in Palestinian-civilian deaths. Palestinian death was his goal, and he guaranteed it, by cowardly commingling his army among innocents. In Sinwar’s moral calculus, the more suffering the better, because it hastened the delegitimization of Israel and, in his phantasmagoric view, the arrival of a Muslim state between the river and the sea.
Many nations have pleaded with Israel to end this war. It’s a moral travesty that they didn’t simultaneously direct their pleas to Sinwar. At any moment, he could have attempted to spare his people. He could have surrendered and proposed exiling himself to another country; he could have handed over the hostages and accepted the Israeli terms for a cease-fire, which weren’t that far from his own.
That Sinwar avoided shouldering moral culpability for Palestinian death in broad swaths of Western opinion is testament to his sinister strategic sensibility. Israel possessed superior military technology. But it was Sinwar who possessed the state-of-the-art military brain. He embraced what the Russians like to call hybrid warfare. That is, he studied public perception in Israel and the West—and he calibrated his military strategy to achieve his goals. Around the time that protests erupted on American college campuses, he seemed to harden his negotiating position. U.S. intelligence officials and diplomats told me that they suspected that he didn’t want to end the war, which was advancing his long-term objective of building Western disdain for Israel.
One doesn’t need to be a Netanyahu apologist, or even a supporter of this war, to believe that Israel’s critics are applying a perverse moral logic. Israel gets accused of genocide, when Sinwar doggedly implemented an explicitly eliminationist ideology. His army didn’t incidentally kill babies in the course of pursuing an enemy combatant. It did so staring at infants and their parents in the eyes. I keep thinking about the murder of six hostages at the end of August. They were killed even though their lives were valuable bargaining chips in a negotiation to end the war, as those negotiations were headed in the direction of a deal. It was the senseless murder of Jews for the sake of murdering Jews.
Sinwar’s improbable survival gave the Israeli government an excuse to delay thinking about the day after, to deflect the looming questions about Gaza’s future: Who will secure the Strip? Who will govern it? But avoiding these hard questions has only made Israel’s choices worse. Despite the offers of assistance from Sunni Arab states and America, it has not even an inkling of a plan for Gaza. In the short term, the only viable alternatives are anarchy and occupation, both of which are moral catastrophes in the making. But perhaps Sinwar’s death will finally permit a moment of cathartic grief. By easing people’s pain, it could free their minds.