Israel’s Killing of Hamas’ Leader Is an Opening—if Both Sides Want to Take It

Yahya Sinwar, the long-pursued leader of the Hamas terrorist organization, is dead, killed in a gunfight by Israeli soldiers in southern Gaza.

As a result, the chances of ending this yearlong war—and perhaps all of Israel’s other wars in the region—are as great as they ever have been, at least if all the combatants’ leaders want to end the fighting.

Sinwar had been hiding in Hamas’ elaborate network of tunnels for most of the time since he planned and pulled off the Oct. 7 invasion that killed nearly 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians—the largest number of Jews killed in a single day since the Holocaust. The war that he triggered has, in the year since, killed an estimated 40,000 Gazans, perhaps half of them civilians, many of them women and children.

On Thursday, Israeli soldiers fired at and killed three gunmen seen in a building in southern Gaza. They did not suspect that one of the gunmen was Sinwar. Upon noticing that he looked a lot like Hamas’ leader, the soldiers called in superiors, who took the man’s DNA, fingerprints and dental impressions. Israeli officials had such records for Sinwar from the time he was a prisoner. Officials soon after announced that the records were a match.

Sinwar was not just the military and then the political leader of Hamas, but also its very personification, in much the same way that Saddam Hussein was the emblem of Iraq’s Baathist Party and Adolf Hitler was the sworn-to demigod of the Nazis.

For that reason, he has been Israel’s main target in this war. Can Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet now take the killing as enough of an accomplishment—touting it, whether altogether correctly or not, as vindication of their strategy—to press, or accept pressure from others, for a cease-fire?

In his new book, War,........

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