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Hamas is headless. On Thursday, Israel confirmed that it had killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in southern Gaza. The terrorist group’s top commander was the architect of the October 7, 2023 attack in Israel that killed 1,200 people. Israel has “settled its account” with the Hamas leader, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, adding that “war is not yet ended.” Sinwar’s death comes after Israeli assassinations of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon last month and Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, in Iran in July. Is this a turning point in Israel’s war in Gaza? What does the future look like for the region’s other Iranian proxies? Below, Atlantic Council experts share their insights on this developing story.
Pressure will increase for a Gaza ceasefire, but the Lebanon campaign will continue
In July, when Israel killed Hamas’s previous leader, Haniyeh, at a government guest house in Tehran, the Hamas Shura council chose its Gaza-based leader and October 7 mastermind, Sinwar, to be the overall chief of the group. Today, the choice of a successor is likely to be more challenging. Much of Hamas has clamored for a respite from the conflict and favored a hostages-for-prisoners deal that would also mean at least a temporary cessation of hostilities. Sinwar was not nearly as inclined to have an end of hostilities, and for months Israeli leaders insisted that he was the true impediment to a ceasefire deal, having changed his demands. That culpability will quickly be put to the test.
A new leader, especially one coming from outside Gaza, may be more inclined to finalize a deal than Sinwar was. At minimum, his death provides a renewed opening, the best that’s existed in months, for US President Joe Biden to again push for a ceasefire. For Israelis, Sinwar’s death will be viewed as a victory and as perhaps the best opportunity to convince their political leadership to make a deal for the hostages, ensuring that domestic political pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be greater than at any point since the war began.
But even if Netanyahu is inclined to consider such a deal at this point—which is far from a sure thing—the interrelated challenges Israel is working through are unlikely to dissipate simply because Sinwar is no longer leading Hamas.
For more than a year, Hezbollah’s leaders have insisted on tying Hezbollah rocket attacks against Israel to Israel’s operations in Gaza. Israel’s operations in Lebanon have already begun and are not likely to stop, no matter the result in Gaza, unless the parties are able to strike a deal so broad that it also includes Hezbollah’s Radwan Force moving away from the border, allowing some 70,000 Israelis finally to return home. Even then, while the IDF was in conflict with Israeli political leaders about a hostage deal in Gaza, there is far more unity related to operations in Lebanon. With air and ground operations already under way, the IDF is likely to want to continue eliminating Hezbollah’s cache of its most lethal weapons, such as ballistic and cruise missiles.
Sinwar’s death almost certainly won’t prompt Israel to reverse course and decline to strike Iran in retaliation for its ballistic missile attack on October 1, even if it comes as new negotiations are underway for a deal in Gaza. The necessity to ensure deterrence is reestablished has never been of greater importance to Israel.
Today marks an opportunity to begin to close one of the most painful chapters in Israel’s recent history, something that will only be completed once the hostages are released. But it is far from the end of the book. How Israel chooses to further leverage today’s success will determine whether the next chapters are better than this one.
—Jonathan Panikoff is the director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative. He is a former deputy national intelligence officer for the Near East at the US National Intelligence Council.
Sinwar’s death could provide an off-ramp for the war in Gaza
The death of Sinwar was inevitable the minute that he decided to launch the October 7 attack, which triggered a disastrous war that shattered the Gaza Strip’s people and infrastructure.
Sinwar’s elimination could provide the Israeli government with several off-ramps and openings to start to end the war in Gaza. The chaos within Hamas following Sinwar’s death may provide a chance to exploit uncertainties and divisions to expedite the release of the remaining Israeli hostages and the implementation of a general stand-down and demobilization within Hamas. Israel, Arab nations, and the United States should now offer mass amnesty for remaining Hamas members who lay down their arms and stop fighting. They should also offer financial rewards to those who either turn in Israeli hostages or provide information leading to the whereabouts of remaining abductees. Israel should make clear its intention to pull out of Gaza and avoid the reoccupation of the Strip in the immediate future. And Gaza should be opened up for Arab, international, and Palestinian Authority figures and professionals to come in and begin stabilizing the war-torn Strip to initiate the “day after.”
But the “day after” is not here yet. And Sinwar’s death raises eight more pressing questions in the meantime:
Who can Israel and Arab nations negotiate with when it comes to Gaza and Hamas’s future role?
Who within Hamas in Gaza will control the issue of Israeli hostages, and who could command enough authority to make the group’s rank-and-file members release the hostages?
How much tactical and operational control did Sinwar have over Hamas’s day-to-day activities throughout the Gaza Strip?
Will Hamas splinter into small, disconnected cells inside Gaza, or can an interim leader emerge to keep the organization together?
Will elements of Hamas use Sinwar’s killing as an opportunity to step back and negotiate an end to the war that effectively amounts to a soft surrender?
Was Sinwar holding back more “moderate” elements within Hamas from making concessions to end the war, and could they emerge now to stop the war that he initiated?
Sinwar likely prepared contingencies for his eventual assassination. What could such scenarios entail? Do they include potential harm to remaining Israeli hostages? Did he intend for his killing to trigger a series of irrational and criminal actions? What sort of leadership transition did Sinwar envision for this eventuality?
How will Hamas’s leadership abroad react to this development? Can they credibly force Hamas in Gaza to make concessions or follow the commands of the group’s leadership in Qatar, Lebanon, and Turkey?The answers to many of these important questions will be answered in the coming days and weeks.
—Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib is a resident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs.
An opportunity for Israel to ‘declare victory’ and shift focus
The now-confirmed death of Sinwar offers a potential off-ramp for Israel from its year-long Gaza offensive. Having decapitated Hamas’s leadership convincingly—remaining members of its hierarchy include Khaled Mashal and Musa Abu Marzook, both residing outside of Gaza—Israel could leverage this moment to “declare victory” and shift sharply toward a ceasefire/hostage deal with a severely downgraded Hamas. In that scenario, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would then shrink its Gaza deployment drastically, devoting more of its limited resources to inhibiting Hamas’s rejuvenation, and pivot to focusing almost exclusively on other theaters, most prominently Iran. Initial indications are that Netanyahu might be interested in precisely such an outcome, which could open the door to more practical discussions on the future of Gaza reconstruction involving international partners. It remains to be seen whether conditions on the ground, including his political circumstances, facilitate—or resist—that trajectory.
—Shalom Lipner is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative who previously worked in foreign policy and public diplomacy during his time at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem, where he served in the administration of seven consecutive Israeli premiers.
Sinwar’s death aside, Israel intends to operate in Gaza for many years
Eliminating Hamas leadership—and most importantly, killing Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7 massacre—has been a central goal for Israel in its Gaza war. The achievement will mark yet another personal victory for Netanyahu, whose polling has been bolstered with each targeted assassination, and for Israel’s military.
But Sinwar’s death alone does not guarantee the circumstances necessary for Netanyahu to declare an end to the war as so many hope. The United States is likely to further increase its pressure on both sides to come to a ceasefire agreement, hoping that a weakened Hamas and an empowered Israel will be more ready to bring the conflict to its close. And while Hamas, for its part, has been thrown into disarray, it will need time to reestablish leadership and for that leadership—likely with Sinwar’s brother at the top—to solidify power. As Israel has made clear, in order for the war to end, the hostages must be released and Hamas must fully disarm. But it is not clear that any successor to Sinwar will take a new approach.
At the same time, Netanyahu now has an easy off-ramp from war in Gaza at a moment when Israel’s northern front now takes priority, but he is unlikely to take it. Israeli officials and opposition leaders have made it clear that Israel intends to operate in Gaza for years. Any official end to the war will require Netanyahu to reconcile both with the atrocity that took place under his watch and to articulate a strategy for a day after in Gaza. So far, he has not been prepared to do either—and Sinwar’s death alone is unlikely to change that.
—Carmiel Arbit is a nonresident senior fellow for Middle East Programs and the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council.
Hamas and Hezbollah leadership are diminished. Are the Houthis next?
Israel’s elimination of Hamas’s Sinwar and Hezbollah’s Nasrallah has left both organizations diminished in the near term, but it has created an opportunity for Yemen’s Houthis and their leader, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, to step into a new and more prominent role within Iran’s “Axis of Resistance.” With greater importance placed on the Houthis, Tehran will likely prioritize providing the group with advanced weapons and weapon components to enable more accurate and devastating maritime operations and strikes on Israeli territory. One way Iran might do this is through brokering an agreement with Moscow to provide the group with anti-ship missiles. Continued Houthi threats to Israeli territory and international maritime traffic could lead the IDF to shift the focus of its operations in Yemen to targeting al-Houthi and other senior members, which could degrade the group’s ability to operate, spur a leadership crisis, and widen the leadership vacuum within Iran’s network of allies and proxies.
—Emily Milliken is the associate director of media and communications for the N7 Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs.
Sinwar’s assassination won’t solve Israel’s strategic problems
Since the tragic events of October 7, Israeli leaders vowed to eliminate Sinwar, the man who was in charge of Hamas’s vicious attack against Israel. Today, it seems that this goal was achieved, as the IDF was able to kill Sinwar in the Gaza Strip.
But, as important as this event is, it won’t solve Israel’s strategic problems if the current policy of the Israeli government does not change. It is safe to say that even after Sinwar, the Hamas organization will not collapse. Thus the war will continue, with no political solution on the horizon.
In order to utilize Sinwar’s elimination, Israel will need to rethink its strategy in Gaza. First and foremost, that means reaching a ceasefire deal while allowing the Palestinian Authority to return to Gaza, taking control of all civilian activities. This move would allow the moderate Gulf states to increase their involvement in Gaza’s rehabilitation and would significantly improve Israel’s international legitimacy.
A ceasefire in Gaza will also lead to the end of hostilities with Hezbollah along the northern border of Israel and of course will lead to the release of hostages—a main goal of the current Swords of Iron War.
If Israel continues its current strategy of holding parts of Gaza and maybe building settlements there (like some ministers want), then despite the importance of Sinwar’s elimination, no dramatic change will occur in the near future. The war will continue with no end in sight.
—Danny Citrinowicz is a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs and a member of the Atlantic Council’s Iran Strategy Project working group. He previously served for twenty-five years in a variety of command positions units in Israel Defense Intelligence.
Israel’s guns are unlikely to fall silent soon
What began as a hunt for Sinwar and for vengeance for the October 7 attacks has transformed into an expansive quest by Israel to fundamentally reshape control over the West Bank and Gaza, to weaken Iran, and to violently remake the region. It’s therefore unlikely that Israel’s guns will fall silent soon, imperiling many thousands of civilian lives as well as any long-term prospects for normalcy or peace.
—Alia Brahimi is a nonresident senior fellow in the Middle East Programs and host of the Guns for Hire podcast.
Sinwar’s death opens the way to a resolution of the Gaza conflict
Yes, this is a big deal. To many Israelis, the death of Yahya Sinwar a year and ten days after October 7 will likely mean as much, if not more, than the fate meted out to Osama bin Laden did to Americans nine and a half years after 9/11. To Israelis, the death toll on October 7 was proportionately many times the death toll in the United States on 9/11. More importantly, by May 2011 bin Laden had ceased to be the driving operational force behind al-Qaeda, while until today Sinwar was very much both the military and political driving force behind Hamas’s unwillingness to agree to a ceasefire and the return of hostages on any terms that Israel could accept.
Those cautious voices claiming Hamas is an idea that cannot be defeated militarily are about to see their theory tested. While some terrorists and warlords make plans for after their deaths, many do not. It is widely believed that Sinwar accepted that he would be killed, and so he may have made plans for Hamas to carry on his brutal rule and unrealistic ambitions after his death. Other terrorist groups have fractured after the death of their leader, but Hamas is rare among terrorist groups in having been the de facto government of Gaza, which gives it more organizational depth and a bigger war chest than smaller terrorist groups.
There will probably be a short window for Hamas’s new leaders to work out a ceasefire-for-hostages deal through Egyptian, Qatari, and US mediators. If not, and depending on the US election on November 5, the United States and its Arab and European partners should push the Israelis and the Palestinians to authorize a temporary international administration for Gaza, overseen by an international contact group, backed by an international policing force, to ensure that Hamas does not return to power. Detailed plans for this exist, and the United Arab Emirates has been leading efforts to bring the United States and Israel around to what would be required to make something like this work. The Biden national security team has reportedly been considering this. Celebrations today in Israel and mixed emotions in Gaza and the West Bank need to give way to pragmatic decisions toward an end to the fighting and a lasting peace for both Israelis and Palestinians.
—Thomas Warrick, the former deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism policy at the US Department of Homeland Security and senior advisor to the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, is a nonresident senior fellow for the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Institute.
Even Iran and Hezbollah might want a ceasefire after Sinwar’s death
The death of Sinwar may provide the opportunity, if Netanyahu is looking for one, to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza. Sinwar was reportedly the mastermind behind the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. It was always doubtful, in my view, that the Netanyahu government would agree to any ceasefire so long as Sinwar remained the leader of Hamas.
It is not clear, of course, whether either Sinwar’s successors or the Netanyahu government will now agree to a ceasefire. Western governments (including the United States) and most Arab governments would welcome a ceasefire. Even Iran and Hezbollah—both of whom have voiced support for Hamas—might welcome a ceasefire, if only to raise the possibility of tamping down their own conflicts with Israel. Russia and China, too, might breathe a sigh of relief about reducing the possibility of war in the Middle East expanding.
Whether a ceasefire occurs, though, will depend on whether Israel and Hamas can agree on the terms of one.
—Mark N. Katz is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs and professor emeritus of government and politics at the George Mason University Schar School of Policy and Government.
What does Sinwar’s death mean for the remaining hostages?
The assassination of Sinwar, the leader of Hamas who was considered to be the mastermind of the October 7 massacres, was expected by most observers of the IDF operations in Gaza. Coming after the elimination of Haniyeh, the leader of the political wing of Hamas, and of Muhammad Deif, the head of the military wing, it sent a clear message from the Israeli security establishment that anyone who crosses Israel could be reached anywhere and dealt with effectively. This leaves one big open question: what does this mean for the hostages taken by Hamas?
On the one hand, the hostages may have a better chance now that the whole leadership of Hamas has been wiped away, and thus no one within the organization would be willing to take the deadly risk of looking after them, meaning the hostages may be left to their own devices and able to escape. On the other hand, the hostages’ fate may now be sealed for the simple reason that there is no one left to negotiate their release. The fear is also that mid-level Hamas operatives may be tempted to eliminate the hostages to protect their own identities from the eventual retaliation of Israeli forces.
Many other readings and predictions are circulating, but the truth is that nobody knows with any degree of certainty what will happen to the hostages. One thing is certain though: the decision of the then-elite of Hamas to unleash last year’s horrible attacks against the Israeli population in nearby settlements has only brought pain and suffering to everyone and not only to those directly involved. At the same time, the brutality of the IDF reaction, while it may be seen as advantageous in the short term, in the longer term will only cause the rise of another generation of terrorists imbued with a desire for revenge and hate for everyone in the world who didn’t stand by them. Israel has traded short-term gains for long-term losses.
—Karim Mezran is director of the North Africa Initiative and resident senior fellow with the Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council.
Hamas will now seek to frame Sinwar’s death as an act of martyrdom and heroism
The assassination of Sinwar, Hamas’s leader and mastermind behind the October 7 attack on Israel, is seen by many as a pivotal moment for the Israeli government and its stated objective of dismantling Hamas in Gaza. The decapitation of Hamas’s leadership will hopefully move the conflict in a new direction toward a ceasefire. To that end, the Israeli government would be best off offering amnesty to those who lay down their arms, facilitating the release of Israeli hostages, and clarifying a postwar plan for Gaza that guarantees no future occupation of the Strip by Israel.
However, with many hostages still being held by Hamas and some Israeli leaders openly discussing the possibility of settling northern Gaza (in direct violation of international law) and “operating in the Strip for years to come,” the prospects for a peaceful resolution in the near term still seem remote.
On the ground, Sinwar’s death will likely be framed as an act of martyrdom and heroism, particularly amid reports that he was killed in combat garb alongside his soldiers. As Amos Yadlin, a former IDF intelligence chief, pointed out, every leader has a successor. The pressing question now is whether the new leadership, within Gaza’s deeply entrenched insurgency, will be willing to de-escalate and negotiate—and if there is anyone on the other side willing to reach out with an olive branch.
—Masoud Mostajabi is the deputy director of the Iraq Initiative at the Middle East Programs of the Atlantic Council.
With its Hamas targets dead, the ICC still must move forward its cases against Israeli leaders
The reported killing of the Hamas leader by Israeli forces has wide-ranging implications for an expanding regional conflict—and also necessitates a firm spine in The Hague.
Karim A.A. Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), announced the filing of applications for arrest warrants against Hamas leaders and Israeli leaders back in May. Nearly five months and many reports of intimidation and public condemnations from Israel later, the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber has yet to issue those warrants. The delay has come under fire by many observers, since warrants in most cases at the ICC have been issued within one or two months of the initial application. While the arrest warrant application has been pending, the Hamas leaders named as perpetrators have been killed by Israel one by one, with Israel killing Haniyeh in Tehran at the end of July and Israel claiming that it killed Mohammed Deif in a strike in Gaza in mid-July.
Israel has clearly committed to settling its disputes through kinetic means. Those brutalized in Gaza, however, are still waiting for justice. It will be incumbent on the court to move ahead with the issuance of arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, regardless of any pressure resulting from the Israeli state’s claims of false equivalency or imbalance.
—Gissou Nia is a human rights lawyer and the director of the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Litigation Project.
