Snatching Victory from Defeat:  Hamas Leader Yahya Sinwar’s Last Stand

Yahya Sinwar 2

No coward soul is mine, No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere
–Emily Brontë

For the millionth time, Palestinians have won the moral victory.  Defiant to the very end the Hamas leader died fighting the genocidal occupier.  For an entire year the occupier insisted he was skulking in the tunnels and using the hostages of October 7, 2023 as human shields.  He had left the fighting and the dying to Hamas militants and abandoned civilians to the trauma and devastation of unrelenting aerial bombardment and ground invasion.  On October 16, 2024 unremitting Zionist propaganda was countered by the leader himself in a manner that exposed the baseness of the enemy in the most decisive way possible.  With the release of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) video  of the Hamas leader’s last moments, Israeli Zionists dealt the death blow to their own propaganda.

The sequence is well known to whoever is watching the genocide in the occupied Palestinian territories.  In an encounter that took place off camera, the Hamas leader and his comrades engaged Israeli soldiers equipped with state of the art armaments.  On the Palestinian side the combatants were limited by their primitive weaponry.  Following the firefight they separated and took refuge in bombed out buildings.  Somehow the Hamas leader managed to stagger and stumble into a building from which the owners had fled and collapse into an armchair.  Hunted for months with a bounty on his head and cornered by his enemies, he was crippled in his vastly unequal confrontation with the armed to the teeth occupier and his right hand had been severed.  With his single remaining arm he hurled a primitive missile at the automated emissary of the hated and despised occupier.  In a final—and culminating—act of resistance he brought down the drone that his cowardly antagonists had flown into the building to film him.  At the very moment of defeat and imminent death, the Hamas warrior seized victory and an honored place in the annals of armed resistance to colonial rule and oppression.  

As images of the sorely wounded and dying Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s fierce defiance of the Israeli occupation spread across the world like wildfire and took the internet by storm, spin masters and genocide apologists in the mainstream Western media were filled with consternation.  At this moment surely chaos and uncertainty reigned in the newsrooms.  This was not the hoped for craven death that was to be gloated over, televised, live streamed and shared on social media around the world in the modern era’s equivalent of the triumphal processions of Roman conquerors.  The Western news media knew—who better than they–that the IDF video of the dying leader’s last moments would have a galvanizing effect on global viewers who had been taking to the streets since October 7 2023 in their thousands or tens even hundreds of thousands and calling for an end to Israel’s genocidal warfare in the occupied Palestinian territories.  They quailed when the possible termination of the Israeli campaign of extermination loomed before them.  No matter that the genocidal assault on a trapped and defenseless population, cut off from the world,  devoid of an air force and modern weaponry had been orchestrated with great enthusiasm by the US and other NATO powers.  No matter that the inexorable flow of arms could be expected to continue.  Somehow the sheen had to be stripped from the fallen leader’s dying moments.  Somehow it was incumbent on the media cheerleaders of genocide to swiftly put forth commentaries that imparted a negative spin to the heroic last stand of the leader of the Palestinian liberation movement.  Accordingly they swung into damage control mode.  

And as they started pouring out their columns, one is reminded for the umpteenth time of the observation that has been made since the launch of the Israeli genocide in the occupied Palestinian territories—that without the willing dissemination of Zionist propaganda by the mainstream Western media, the genocide could never have continued into its second year.  “It is impossible to overstate the role that the incendiary media coverage played in the events that would unfold after Hamas and its allies broke down the fence that surrounds Gaza,” declared Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News.  The New York Times occupies pride of place in this regard.  In mid April 2024, The Intercept published an exposé of a memo that showed the New York Times had instructed its journalists to limit the use of words like genocide and ethnic cleansing and to avoid using the phrase occupied territory when writing about Palestine.  Reporters were also asked to not to use the term refugee camps to refer to enclaves in Gaza where Palestinian refugees had settled when they fled the ethnic cleansing that went hand in hand with the founding of the state of Israel.  If the hundred years war on Palestine by colonial and post colonial powers was to be airbrushed out of history well the New York Times was more than happy to do that.  The right kind of lexicon was all that was needed.         

The journalist Jason Burke’s Guardian article of October 17 follows the lexical recommendations of the New York Times.  In the entire article there is not a single mention of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.  The article quotes the testimony of an Israeli former interrogator who said:  “He’s 1,000% committed and 1,000% violent, a very, very hard man.”  Well, if the inescapable and overpowering context of the Israeli occupation is excluded from the article, obviously Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s commitment to militant resistance will appear to result from an inherently violent personality.  Some of the points made by the journalist are truly risible.  For instance:  “Sinwar threw up a smokescreen, lulling Israel into false security…”   What exactly does that mean?  Is the leader of a resistance movement supposed to disclose military plans to the occupier by making a public announcement?  The article ends with:  “…he died as he had lived: with an unremitting commitment to Hamas and its ideology, and to violence.”  The implication seems to be Israeli warfare has an unremitting commitment to non-violence.  A merciful genocide perhaps?  The international security correspondent of the liberal Guardian newspaper seems unaware that UNGA resolution 37/43 affirms the right of occupied peoples to armed struggle.  Because his article emphasizes the Islamist ideology of Hamas, one would never find out that the Hamas movement seeks national liberation and an end to Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.  Readers are to be kept in the dark at all costs.

In the BBC article Yahya Sinwar: Who was the Hamas leader? the security correspondent Frank Gardner writes:  ‘An Israeli government assessment of Sinwar during his time in prison described his character as “cruel, authoritative, influential and with unusual abilities of endurance, cunning and manipulative, content with little… Keeps secrets even inside prison amongst other prisoners… Has the ability to carry crowds”.’  The assessment of Ehud Yaari, fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is also quoted in some detail.  Why for heaven’s sake is the expert opinion cited in the article limited to the input of an Israeli interrogator and the researcher at a pro-Israeli think tank?  Observers of the genocidal campaign in Gaza might be interested for instance in the views of the Palestinian analyst Tareq Baconi, author of a book on the Hamas movement.  But not the BBC or the BBC security correspondent.  Fo them, an informed Palestinian perspective on the crisis in the leadership of the Hamas movement holds zero interest.  Predictably the article gives a positive representation of Israel:  “Israelis feel they were lulled into a false sense of security in the mistaken belief that by offering Hamas economic incentives and more work permits, the movement would have lost its appetite for war.”  So the Israelis sought to maintain a nice, benign occupation and were foiled by the Hamas movement’s addiction to armed struggle against occupation. 

Then there is the contribution of David Remnick, author and editor of the prestigious New Yorker magazine.  In The Killing of Yahya Sinwar, along with obligatory reminders of the Hamas leader’s ruthlessness and capacity for violence, we are told that the IDF’s photographs of the slain Yahya Sinwar showed “closeups of a gaunt Palestinian man with sharp cheekbones.”  A gaunt Palestinian man with sharp cheekbones?  The use of the word gaunt is surely ill-advised in the context of the savage genocide taking place in the occupied Palestinian territories.  That single word goes like a knife through the heart and the mind.  It’s merely a truism to say people become gaunt when they are subjected to starvation diet for more than a year.  Is David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker magazine, Pulitzer prize winner, author of several books, not aware of this elementary fact?   Northern Gaza is now the scene of a genocide within a genocide.  Among the hundreds of thousands who have been squeezed into a small space where food and aid supplies have been cut off since the beginning of October, there will be numerous gaunt men and women.  Let’s not even go into the issues of irreversible physiological and psychological damage to the survivors—if any–of a genocide that has entered its second year and shows no sign of being brought to a halt.   

The parsing of mainstream commentaries that swiftly followed the release of the damaging IDF video of the dying Hamas leader could be continued ad infinitum.  Or ad nauseum.  The point has been made.  There’s nothing to be gained by a deep dive into what CNN said and the New York Times.  Or who regurgitated the fully debunked stories about the beheading of babies and the systematic weaponizing of sexual assault in the Hamas led attacks of October 7, 2023.  Like the altogether fictitious weapons of mass destruction used to create public support and justify the illegal and unconscionable invasion of Iraq in 2003, the stories of beheaded babies and women who were raped en masse will be laid to rest some day.  But the time for that has not come.  For now the atrocity propaganda is serving the essential purpose of justifying and sustaining the genocide in the occupied Palestinian territories.  

Little wonder that presidential candidate Kamala Harris chose to revive the sexual assault propaganda in September in the presidential debate with Donald Trump:  “Women were horribly raped,” she claimed during the debate. “And so absolutely, I said then I say now Israel has a right to defend itself. We would.”  It would be surprising if there were no incidents of rape during the Hamas led attacks of October 7, 2023.  The allegation of weaponization and cold-blooded use of sexual assault by Hamas fighters is an altogether different matter.  It is on par with the deadly lies about Saddam Hussain’s weapons of mass destruction.  In the build up to the Bush administration’s illegal invasion of Iraq, the mainstream media led by the New York Times was fully on board with the administration’s push to war.  Speaking of the New York Times it is relevant to recall that the leading newspaper has yet to retract its sensational—and discredited–story of December 2023,  ‘Screams Without Words’:  Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.  The article begins by declaring “Hamas Subjected Israeli Women to Horrors Before Killing Them, Evidence Shows” and despite rambling on at great length fails to provide evidence that stands up to rigorous scrutiny.  The lurid allegations in the article were swiftly punctured in an item by item examination by the journalist Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada.  He brought out the unreliability of the NYT’s so called key witnesses–given that their stories have changed over time–and the complete absence of forensic evidence that substantiates their stories.  In its exposé of February 28 The Intercept concluded that the “Times’s mission was to bolster a predetermined narrative.”

For now some of the stories of the US-Israeli genocide linger in the public memory—eighteen year old Shaban al-Dalou, software engineering student who was burned alive still connected to an IV drip when Israeli bombing set fire to a tent camp of displaced Palestinians outside Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, five year old Hind Rajab, trapped for hours in a car from which she made desperate calls for assistance and killed by artillery from Israeli tanks, leading Gaza surgeon Adnan Al-Bursh,  head of orthopedics at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, captured by Israeli soldiers in December and declared dead in April after undergoing months of torture in an Israeli prison.  Soon these will be supplanted by the harrowing stories of more recent victims of the ongoing genocide.  And Yahya Sinwar?  The man who told the Italian journalist in 2018:  “I want the end of the siege. You walk to the beach at sunset and you see all these teenagers on the shore chatting and wondering what the world looks like across the sea. What life looks like…I want them to be free.”  What form will remembrance take?   

Who dares to take the name of that foul monster Yahya Sinwar without condemning him with the strongest adjectives at their command?  Was he not a twenty-first century Genghis Khan whose terrorist, barbarian hordes breached the security fence behind which they had been safely entrapped and imprisoned in a siege that began in the 90’s as a result of the Oslo process and intensified as the decades went on?  Are we not speaking of a brutal and ruthless operator who masterminded the unprecedented surprise attacks in which thousands of baby killers and rapists broke out of their prison and poured into the territory wherein gentle, civilized Israelis resided?  Never mind the forefathers of present day Palestinian fighters had for centuries inhabited that very territory.  No matter parents and grandparents of Hamas militants had fled those villages in the ethnic cleansing that accompanied the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 or in subsequent expulsions of the native population.  The things that count for the ruling class of the Western world are the artfully invented stories of decapitation of forty Israeli babies and weaponization of sexual assault on Israeli women by Hamas fighters.  One can only hope those diabolical fictions will not be revived by some candidate in US elections four years from now.  

The deaths of over 1100 Israelis still remains to be discussed here.  About 800 of those who died were civilians,  What goes unmentioned in the leading news media is the uncertainty about responsibility for civilian killings on October 7 and subsequent days.  The question of whether the Israeli army’s notorious Hannibal directive was implemented in thrusting back Hamas militants was raised as far back as October 2023 in the alternative news sources Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss and revived by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper in July 2024.  Since then a meticulous year long investigation by the journalist Asa Winstanley of the Electonic intifada has shown that the number of Israelis who became collateral damage as Israeli forces struggled to repel Hamas fighters is far higher than previously thought.  The journalist’s conclusions are based on information found in unimpeachable sources such as Israeli news reports and a UN Human Rights Council report.  What remains once the atrocity propaganda has been refuted and the Israeli hand in the killing of Israeli citizens exposed?  The answer is—a spectacularly successful hostage taking operation intended to obtain the freedom of thousands of Palestinians held for years in Israeli prisons, many of them without being charged.  Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was held in Israeli prisons for 22 years.  After his release in a prisoner exchange in 2011, he regarded it as his moral duty to secure the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody.

Armchair analysts have no conception of the treacherous terrain in which revolutionaries operate beset as they are by prowling enemies who are constantly seeking internal collaborators who will undermine the movement from within.  We want our revolutionaries and leaders of movements for national liberation to be saintly and pure as driven snow.  Robespierre fails that test.  So do Lenin and Che Guevara.  Yahya Sinwar was far from being merely a sweet and gentle theorist of revolutionary and anti-colonial, anti-imperialist politics.  The words of the Irish poet WB Yeats come to mind as one reflects on the life of Yahya Sinwar and the complexities of his personality and his politics:

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone…
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart…
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died.  (Easter 1916)

Theirs was an anti-colonial struggle in a different era.  Thankfully (or so one thinks in the time of genocide) their colonizer was not genocidal.  


Yahya Sinwar’s parents were refugees who had been violently uprooted from their native village of al-Majdal Asqalan in historic Palestine in Israel’s ethnic cleansings of 1948.  Historic Palestine’s village of Al-Majdal Asqalan has since been appropriated into the present day Israeli city of Ashkalon.  Yahya Sinwar was born in 1962 in a refugee camp in Khan Younis, Gaza.  In his boyhood as well as throughout his adult life, he was placed on a collision course with a brutal and violent occupation that inexorably tightened its stranglehold over the Palestinian territories.  In his last recorded interview in 2021 with Vice news journalist Hind Hassan the so-called terrorist reasoned as follows:  The battle between us and the occupation…is an open ended battle. We know that we don’t want war or fighting because it costs lives, and our people deserve peace. For long periods of time we’ve tried peaceful resistance…Unfortunately the world stood by and watched as the occupation war machine killed our young people…What are we supposed to do? Should we raise the white flag? That is not going to happen.”  He was far from being an apostle of non-violence. Throughout his life and with his dying breath he fought the occupation of his homeland with all the strength at his command. He dedicated his remarkable abilities to the cause of the liberation of his homeland. His untimely death in the second year of the US-Israeli genocide denied him the joy or the relief of witnessing the event and the process that he had envisioned.

Radha Surya is a freelance writer. Her articles have appeared on Znet and Countercurrents.

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