Yahya Sinwar's death was predestined

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In 2008, Yahya Sinwar – then an inmate in Israel's Eshel Prison – was diagnosed with a brain tumor. An Israeli surgeon operated on his head and saved his life. Today Israel announced that one of its snipers had done the opposite. Photos of the Hamas leader's body half-submerged in rubble and dust in Rafah show a massive head wound. Sinwar's killing ends a year-long manhunt, but not the invasion that his decision to attack and kidnap Israeli civilians last year all but guaranteed.

Few world leaders have spent as much time as Sinwar reflecting on the manner and significance of her death. During his 22 years in prison he wrote a novel: The thorn and the clovein which Palestinians die gloriously and with poetry on their lips. The novel's theme is martyrdom, and Sinwar appears to have lived in such a way that his own violent death was foreseeable. The farewell poem of one of Sinwar's fictional martyrs advises stoicism: There is no need to fear death, for the day it will come, it will come, “ordained by fate.” One should not fight against what is predestined. “No cautious person can escape fate.”

Sinwar is rumored to have linked his fate to that of some of the approximately 100 remaining Israeli hostages by surrounding himself with them in the event of an attack. Israel says no hostages were killed in the operation, but the fate of tens of thousands of equally innocent Gazans is forcibly linked to Sinwar's. Hamas had been firing rockets at Israel for years, and Israel had assumed that it could tolerate them, especially if it could continually improve its relations with the broader Arab world in the meantime. Sinwar's October 7 attack appeared to have disrupted this status quo as its sole strategic objective. And by committing blatant war crimes against vulnerable people, he gave Israel, in a way that a few petty rocket attacks never would, a justification for a war of annihilation against Hamas. The very fact that the hostages were held and not immediately released constituted a permanent license for Israel to ransack and destroy Gaza in search of its citizens. His insistence that Hamas had done nothing wrong on October 7 and would do it again, and even harder, if given the opportunity, eliminated any remaining possibility that Israel would seek a solution that would impress residents would save Gazas from the complete destruction of their country.

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A common political frustration in Israel is that the country is led by Benjamin Netanyahu, whose war decisions are cynical and focused on personal and political gain. The Palestinians suffered an even worse tragedy when they were led by someone who had no sense of urgency to end suffering because he believed that violent death was not only predestined but also noble. (I wonder if Sinwar's long sentence, which reportedly included four years in solitary confinement, distorted his sense of time and gave him an unhealthy patience, when a normal person would desperately search for an immediate path forward, however imperfect.)

What a catastrophe that someone so fatalistic should make urgent decisions! Rounds of pointless negotiations between Israel and Hamas were dragged out and then ended inconclusively because Hamas had to consult Sinwar, its commander in Gaza, and he was difficult to reach in his tunnels. After Israel assassinated Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran this summer, Sinwar was named the group's new top political leader, although having a leader so eagerly hunted might be enough , when he even goes outside to invite an Israeli missile attack. But the truth is that Sinwar, as commander in Gaza, already had sole executive authority over the area and any other alleged Hamas leader would have had to seek his permission to make important decisions anyway. So everyone waited for Sinwar, who waited to die and was indifferent to the right time. This preference fits well with the preference of some Israelis to continue fighting until Hamas is completely eliminated – even at the expense of many Palestinians and probably the hostages as well.

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Sinwar's death will sharpen the group's rhetoric but expand certain options. By not making deals and instead fighting to his own death, Sinwar showed that he had never weakened the resolve he had shown at the start of the war. If this point is proven, there will be less need for his successors to grapple with it further. And Israel will have the opportunity to say it has achieved a core goal. So far, any serious discussion about what Gaza might look like after the war and who could work to secure and rebuild it has avoided. Sinwar's killing is the first milestone in a long time for Israel to pause and consider a realistic next step.

When the Islamic State lost most of its territory, many analysts hopefully suggested that its defeat would serve as a lesson for other jihadists: any future attempt to build a terrorist state would end in that state's destruction. But these analysts have failed to recognize what optimists jihadists can be. Extreme violence may have failed, but it has produced more dramatic results than anything else. The death of Sinwar and the utter destruction of Gaza may serve to remind Palestinians that the enthusiastic murder of Israelis will also have unacceptably painful consequences for Palestinians. But Sinwar's example will also show future generations of martyr-seekers that they can single-handedly take the helm of their cause and steer it toward greater violence. And if they do that, no one will be able to care about anything else. This lesson may be Sinwar's most lasting legacy.