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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced overnight that Mohammed Sinwar, believed to lead Hamas’ armed wing, has been killed. This statement seemingly confirms his death in a recent Gaza Strip strike.
There was no confirmation from Hamas.
Mohammed Sinwar was born in 1975 in the urban Khan Younis refugee camp.
His family was among hundreds of thousands of Palestinians driven from what is now Israel during the 1948 war surrounding its creation.
The refugees and their descendants today make up the majority of Gaza’s population.
Mohammed Sinwar, like his elder brother Yahya, joined Hamas after its inception in the late 1980s as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
He became a member of the group’s military wing, known as the Qassam Brigades.
He climbed the ranks to become a member of the so-called joint chiefs of staff, aligning himself with its longtime leader, Deif, who was killed in a strike last year.
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Mohammed Sinwar was one of the planners of a 2006 cross-border attack on an Israeli army post. In that attack, militants captured Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit, who was held for five years and later exchanged for more than 1000 Palestinian prisoners, including Yahya Sinwar.
In an interview with Qatar’s Al Jazeera TV aired three years ago, Mohammed Sinwar said that when Hamas threatens Israel, “we know how to specify the location that hurts the occupation and how to press them.”
Hamas has said that Mohammed Sinwar was targeted by Israel on several occasions and was briefly believed to have been killed in 2014.
He is said to have been one of a handful of top commanders who knew about the October 7 attack in advance.
In December 2023, the Israeli military released a video it said showed a bearded Mohammed Sinwar sitting next to a driver in a car as it moved inside a tunnel in the Gaza Strip.
Hamas never confirmed what would be one of the few public images of him.
