The death of Yahya Sinwar, one of the last leading figures of the axis of resistance, has shaken the Iranian regime to its core. Sinwar had been groomed by Iran to initiate a broad-scale attack on Israel, as part of the “Unity of Fronts” strategy against the “Little Satan.”
Sinwar’s demise in the ruins of Gaza mirrors the downfall of Nazi leadership in the crumbling remains of Berlin. It serves as a stark reminder of the inevitable collapse faced by regimes, like the Islamic regime in Tehran, that are built on violence and tyranny.
Yahya Sinwar was a favorite of Qasem Soleimani and his successor as Quds Force chief, Esmail Qaani. Following the killing of Ismail Haniyeh, Iran promoted Sinwar to head Hamas in an effort to prolong the ongoing conflict in Gaza and impose heavy costs on Israel’s military, economy, and society. However, his appointment was short-lived.
On October 16, Sinwar was seen by IDF troops along with two other Hamas members moving between several houses in Rafah. Sinwar was wounded and killed in subsequent clashes with Israeli forces and his dead body was found the next day, when the IDF forces entered the home.
After a day of silence, various regime spokesmen declared that Sinwar died as a hero of the resistance, confronting the Israeli enemy. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic’s leader, called Sinwar “the shining face of resistance,” and President Masoud Pezeshkian described him as a “tireless fighter who fought heroically until his last moment.”
Anything but a hero
However, a picture of Sinwar’s demise tells a different story. The Hamas chief was caught running between buildings in Tel Sultan, in an apparent effort to find an entrance to a new tunnel leading out of Rafah to safer areas in the north. The IDF and Shin Bet confirmed that his DNA was later found in the tunnel complex near where the engagement took place.
An image taken by an IDF drone shows his last moments alive: Wounded and bandaged, he is seated in the ruins of a house, hiding behind several chairs, throwing sticks at the drone. His postmortem images are gruesome enough to prompt most mainstream media to blur his face.
Sinwar was anything but a hero. He was the mastermind of the brutal massacre of over 1,200 Israeli civilians, including women and children, on October 7. He was a “malignant narcissist,” renowned for his brutal methods of silencing those whom he viewed as betraying Hamas. His brutality earned him the moniker “the butcher of Khan Yunis,” which many Gazans still use to refer to him as of today.
Sinwar once confronted a Hamas member whose brother was suspected of informing for a rival Palestinian faction and made him bury his own brother alive. A former Israeli interrogator who spent some 180 hours interrogating Sinwar described him as “a man of unfathomable cruelty who was obsessed with the murder of Jews – preferably by machete.”
Sinwar also brought ruin and destruction upon Gaza. His leadership deepened poverty and inflicted significant pain on the Palestinian people. It is no surprise that his demise brought a sense of relief to parts of the population in the Gaza Strip, already exhausted by the prolonged violence and destructive war. Those familiar with the fall of Nazi Germany may find eerie similarities to the corpses of leading Nazis, strewn among the devastation of Berlin, the capital of the Nazi empire, and the corpse of Sinwar in the ruins of the Gaza Strip. The Iranian backers of Hamas, who often evoke genocidal Nazi tropes echoed by Sinwar, may need a crash course on how the Third Reich ended in the greatest catastrophe in German history.
The writer is a senior fellow at the Philos Project.