Hamas the Gaza based militant group has confirmed that its leader Yahya Sinwar has been killed by Israeli security forces.
Sinwar was one of the masterminds of the October 7 terror attack that killed 1500 Israelis and more than 200 hostage taken. This sparked a brutal war that has left more 30,000 Palestinians dead in the Israeli revenge attacks.
“We mourn the great leader, the martyred brother, Yahya Sinwar, Abu Ibrahim,” Qatar-based Hamas official Khalil Al Hayya said in a recorded video statement broadcast by Al Jazeera.
Hayya said Hamas would not release the captives until the war in Gaza ends. The hostages “will not return… unless the aggression against our people in Gaza stops,” the senior Hamas official said.
He called on Israel to withdraw from Gaza and release Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails. Hayya said the group would take strength from Sinwar’s killing, which he said has set him among “the leaders and symbols of the movement who preceded him.”
Directing the fighting in the Palestinian territory as its Gaza leader throughout the war, Sinwar was named the movement’s overall chief in August, after the death of Hamas’s political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in Tehran on July 31.
Sinwar had not been seen in public since the Oct.7 attack, and Israeli commanders believed he hid in a labyrinthine maze of tunnels that Hamas built under the Gaza Strip over the years. With agency reports
