The killing of Sinwar, the mastermind of the deadliest attack in Israeli history, had raised hopes of a turning point in the war, including for families of the Israeli hostages and Gazans enduring a dire humanitarian crisis.

However as Qatar-based Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya mourned Sinwar in a video statement on Friday, he reiterated the Palestinian group’s position that no hostages would be released “unless the aggression against our people in Gaza stops”.

And Israeli forces pummelled Gaza with air strikes on Friday, with rescuers recovering the bodies of three Palestinian children from the rubble of their home in the north of the territory, according to Gaza’s civil defence agency.

“We always thought that when this moment arrived the war would end and our lives would return to normal,” Jemaa Abou Mendi, a 21-year-old Gaza resident, told AFP.

“But unfortunately, the reality on the ground is quite the opposite. The war has not stopped, and the killings continue unabated.”

Sinwar was Israel’s most wanted man, and his death — announced by the Israeli military on Thursday — deals a major blow to the already weakened group.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Sinwar’s killing an “important landmark in the decline of the evil rule of Hamas”.

He added that while it did not spell the end of the war, it was “the beginning of the end”.

‘Opportunity’

Some hailed the news of Sinwar’s death as a sign of better things to come.

“It feels like we’ve finished what we set out to do, and I hope this will also lead to an end,” Dolev, a 29-year-old Tel Aviv resident, told AFP, asking to use only a single name.

US President Joe Biden, whose government is Israel’s top arms provider, said Sinwar’s death was “an opportunity to seek a path to peace, a better future in Gaza without Hamas”.

In a joint statement, Biden and the leaders of Germany, France and Britain emphasised “the immediate necessity to bring the hostages home to their families, for ending the war in Gaza, and ensure humanitarian aid reaches civilians”.

Israeli campaign group the Hostages and Missing Families Forum urged Israel’s government and international mediators to leverage “this major achievement to secure hostages’ return”.

In August, Netanyahu called Sinwar “the only obstacle to a hostage deal”.

Ayala Metzger, daughter-in-law of killed hostage Yoram Metzger, said with Sinwar dead it is “unacceptable” that the hostages would “stay in captivity even one more day”.

But she added: “We (are) afraid that Netanyahu does not intend on stopping the war, nor does he intend to bring the hostages back.”

‘Hell on Earth’

Hamas sparked the war in Gaza by staging the deadliest-ever attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, resulting in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.

During the attack, militants took 251 hostages back into Gaza. Ninety-seven remain there, including 34 who Israeli officials say are dead.

Israel’s campaign to crush Hamas and bring back the hostages has killed 42,500 people in Gaza, the majority civilians, according to data from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, figures which the UN considers reliable.

A “conservative” estimate puts the death toll among children in Gaza at over 14,100, said James Elder, spokesman of the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF.

For the one million children currently in the besieged territory, “Gaza is the real-world embodiment of hell on Earth,” Elder said.

Criticism has been mounting over the civilian toll and lack of food and aid reaching Gaza, where the UN has warned of famine.

‘Devastation’ in Lebanon

Israel is also fighting a war with Hamas ally Hezbollah in Lebanon. The two sides had exchanged rocket fire since the October 7 attack, with Israel sending ground troops across the Lebanese border last month.

On Friday, the Israeli military said in a statement that “over the past day, approximately 60 terrorists were eliminated” in southern Lebanon.

In a separate statement, the military said it had destroyed Hezbollah’s regional command centre with an air strike.

Also on Friday, Hezbollah said it fired a salvo of rockets at the Israeli city of Haifa and areas to its north.

It later said it launched “a swarm of explosives-laden drones” at an “air missile defence base” east of the central Israeli city of Hadera.

The UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon warned that the escalating war “is causing widespread destruction of towns and villages” in the country’s south.

Since late September, the war has left at least 1,418 people dead in Lebanon, according to an AFP tally of Lebanese health ministry figures, though the real toll is likely higher.

The war has also drawn in other Iran-aligned armed groups, including in Yemen, Iraq and Syria.

Iran conducted a missile strike on Israel on October 1, for which Israel has vowed to retaliate.

Iran, Hezbollah, Afghanistan’s Taliban government and Yemen’s Huthi rebels all mourned the death of Sinwar, vowing continued support for their Palestinian ally Hamas.

At a demonstration in Yemen’s capital Sanaa, resident Mutahhar al-Khatib said Sinwar’s death “was shocking news”.

“But if Sinwar is martyred, there will be 10 more in his place,” he told AFP.

The Palestine Liberation Organisation also expressed its condolences over the “martyrdom of the great national leader Yahya Sinwar”.

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The Israeli military said that “after a year-long pursuit”, troops “eliminated Yahya Sinwar, the leader of the Hamas terrorist organisation, in an operation in the southern Gaza Strip” on Wednesday.

Hamas has not confirmed his death.

“Today evil has suffered a heavy blow,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

While the war was “not over yet”, Netanyahu said Sinwar’s death was an “important landmark in the decline of the evil rule of Hamas”.

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said in a statement that Sinwar was a “mass murderer… responsible for the massacre and atrocities of October 7”, while President Isaac Herzog hailed the killing of the militant leader behind “heinous acts of terrorism”.

Israel accuses Sinwar of masterminding the deadliest attack in Israeli history, and had been hunting him down since the start of the Gaza war.

He rose through the ranks of the Palestinian militant group to become first its leader in Gaza, then its overall head after the killing in July of political chief Ismail Haniyeh.

Israel’s announcement on Sinwar comes weeks after it assassinated Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in a massive strike in Lebanon, where the Israeli military has been at war since late September.

A slew of other Iran-backed militant commanders have also been killed in recent months.

With Hamas massively weakened more than a year into the Gaza war, Sinwar’s death could deal a seismic blow to the organisation.

US President Joe Biden, whose government is Israel’s top arms provider, said: “This is a good day for Israel, for the United States, and for the world.”

“There is now the opportunity for a ‘day after’ in Gaza without Hamas in power, and for a political settlement that provides a better future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

Calls for hostage release

Israeli military chief Herzi Halevi said “we are settling the score with Sinwar, who is responsible for that very difficult day a year ago”, vowing to keep fighting “until we capture all the terrorists involved in the October 7 massacre and bring all the hostages home”.

Israel’s Katz said Sinwar’s death could “lead to a new reality in Gaza, one that is without Hamas”.

The Israeli military earlier said it was checking whether Sinwar was one of three militants killed in an operation in Gaza, with an Israeli security official telling AFP that a DNA test was conducted.

Israel has been at war with Hamas since the October 7 attack, which resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.

Israel’s retaliatory campaign in Gaza has killed 42,438 people, the majority civilians, according to data from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, which the UN considers reliable.

Following the attack, Netanyahu vowed to crush Hamas and bring home all 251 hostages seized by militants in their cross-border onslaught. Ninety-seven remain in Gaza, including 34 Israeli officials say are dead.

Israeli military historian Guy Aviad, a Hamas expert, said Sinwar’s killing was “a significant event… but it’s not the end of the war” in either Gaza or Lebanon.

The “Hamas movement still rules the Gaza Strip” and its militants may still harm Israeli hostages who are in “grave danger”, Aviad told AFP.

Campaign group the Hostages and Missing Families Forum urged the Israeli government and international mediators to leverage “this major achievement to secure hostages’ return”.

French President Emmanuel Macron and German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock separately called on Hamas to release all hostages.

Netanyahu, in a video statement, also said Palestinian militants should free the hostages if they want to live.

“Whoever lays down his weapon and returns our hostages — we will allow him to go on living,” he said.

Multi-front fighting

Israel has expanded the scope of its operations to Lebanon, where Hamas ally Hezbollah opened a front against Israel by launching low-intensity cross-border strikes that forced tens of thousands of Israelis to flee their homes.

Israel on Thursday launched strikes on the south Lebanese city of Tyre, where the militant group and its allies hold sway.

The military said five soldiers were killed in combat in southern Lebanon, taking to 19 the number of troop deaths announced since Israel began raids into Lebanon last month.

In Lebanon, the war since late September has left at least 1,373 people dead, according to an AFP tally of Lebanese health ministry figures, though the real toll is likely higher.

Israel also issued evacuation warnings for civilians in parts of Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley, a Hezbollah stronghold, where the official National News Agency reported strikes late on Thursday.

The war has drawn in other Iran-aligned armed groups, while Tehran on October 1 conducted a missile strike on Israel. Israel has vowed to retaliate, sparking concern that what is already a war on multiple fronts could morph into an all-out regional conflict.

In northern Gaza’s Jabalia, two hospitals said Israeli air strikes on a school sheltering displaced people killed at least 14 people.

The military reported that it had hit militants.

As Israel has intensified operations in northern Gaza and issued new evacuation orders, UN human rights chief Volker Turk on Thursday warned that any “large-scale forcible transfer” could constitute a war crime.

Some 345,000 Gazans face “catastrophic” levels of hunger this winter after aid deliveries fell, a UN-backed assessment said.

Nearly 100 percent of Gaza’s population now lives in poverty, the UN’s International Labour Organisation said, warning that the war’s impact on Gaza “will be felt for generations to come”.

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Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas after the Islamist militant group carried out the deadliest attack in the country’s history on October 7.

Hamas militants killed at least 1,400 people, mostly civilians who were shot, mutilated or burnt to death, and took more than 200 hostages, according to Israeli officials.

Israel has retaliated with a relentless bombing campaign on Gaza that has killed more than 4,300 Palestinians, mainly civilians, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

An Israeli siege has cut food, water, electricity and fuel supplies to the densely populated and long-blockaded territory of 2.4 million people, sparking fears of a humanitarian catastrophe.

AFP journalists on Saturday saw 20 trucks from the Egyptian Red Crescent, which is responsible for delivering aid from various UN agencies, pass through the Rafah border crossing from Egypt into Gaza.

The crossing — the only one into Gaza not controlled by Israel — closed again after the trucks passed.

The lorries had been waiting for days on the Egyptian side after Israel agreed to a request from its main ally the United States to allow aid to enter.

UN chief Antonio Guterres warned Friday that the relief supplies were “the difference between life and death” for many Gazans, more than one million of whom have been displaced.

“Much more” aid needs to be sent, he told a peace summit in Egypt on Saturday.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken welcomed the aid and urged “all parties” to keep the Rafah crossing open.

But a Hamas spokesman said “even dozens” of such convoys could not meet Gaza’s needs, especially as no fuel was being allowed in to help distribute the supplies to those in need.

‘Reeling in pain’

Tens of thousands of Israeli troops have deployed to the Gaza border ahead of an expected ground offensive that officials have pledged will begin “soon”.

As international tensions soar, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was hosting a peace summit in Cairo on Saturday attended by regional and some Western leaders.

“The time has come for action to end this godawful nightmare,” Guterres told the summit, calling for a “humanitarian ceasefire”.

The region “is reeling in pain and one step from the precipice”, he said.

Guterres said “the grievances of the Palestinian people are legitimate and long” after “56 years of occupation with no end in sight”.

But he stressed that “nothing can justify the reprehensible assault by Hamas that terrorised Israeli civilians”. 

“Those abhorrent attacks can never justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people,” he added.

Egypt, historically a key mediator between Hamas and Israel, has urged “restraint” and the relaunch of the long-frozen peace process.

But diplomatic efforts to end the violence have made little headway, without the participation of Israel and its enemy Iran, a supporter of Hamas and other armed groups.

‘Sliver of hope’

A full-blown Israeli ground offensive carries many risks, including to the hostages Hamas took and whose fate is shrouded in uncertainty.

So the release of two Americans among the hostages — mother and daughter Judith and Natalie Raanan — offered a rare “sliver of hope”, said Mirjana Spoljaric, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

US President Joe Biden thanked Qatar, which hosts Hamas’s political bureau, for its mediation in securing the release.

He said he was working “around the clock” to win the return of other Americans being held.

Natalie Raanan’s half-brother Ben told the BBC he felt an “overwhelming sense of joy” at the release after “the most horrible of ordeals”.

Hamas said Egypt and Qatar had negotiated the release and that it was “working with all mediators to implement the movement’s decision to close the civilian (hostage) file if appropriate security conditions allow”.

Traumatised families with loved ones missing in Gaza demanded more action.

“We ask humanity to interfere and bring back all those young boys, young girls, mothers, babies,” Assaf Shem Tov, whose nephew was abducted from a music festival where Hamas killed hundreds, said Friday.

Devastation

Almost half of Gaza’s residents have been displaced, and at least 30 percent of all housing in the territory has been destroyed or damaged, the United Nations says.

Thousands have taken refuge in a camp set up in the city of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza.

Fadwa al-Najjar said she and her seven children walked for 10 hours to reach the camp, at some points breaking into a run as missiles struck around them.

“We saw bodies and limbs torn off and we just started praying, thinking we were going to die,” she told AFP.

In Al-Zahra in central Gaza, Rami Abu Wazna was struggling to take in the destruction wreaked by Israeli missile strikes.

“Even in my worst nightmares, I never thought this could be possible,” he said.

Israel’s operation will take not “a day, nor a week, nor a month” and will result in “the end of Israel’s responsibilities in the Gaza Strip”, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant warned on Friday.

Regional tensions flare

In Gaza, retired general Omar Ashour said the destruction was “part of a clear plan for people to have no place left to live”. 

“This will cause a second Nakba,” he added, referring to the 760,000 Palestinians who were expelled from or fled their homes when Israel was created in 1948.

The United States has moved two aircraft carriers into the eastern Mediterranean to deter Iran or Lebanon’s Hezbollah, both Hamas allies, amid fears of a wider conflagration.

Fire across Israel’s border with Lebanon continued overnight, with one Israeli soldier killed, Israeli public radio said. The military said it hit Hezbollah targets after rocket and missile fire.

Violence has also flared in the West Bank, where 84 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

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The battle for Severodonetsk has grown in intensity in recent days, with heavy casualties on both the Ukrainian and Russian sides.

“The Russians are storming, consolidating in the centre of Severodonetsk, while continuing to destroy infrastructure and industrial facilities,” Lugansk region governor Sergiy Gaiday wrote on Telegram early Wednesday. 

One of the industrial hubs on Russia’s path to taking the eastern Lugansk region, Severodonetsk has become a target of Russian firepower since the failed attempt to capture Kyiv. The Russians now control most of the destroyed city, according to regional authorities.

But in a boost for the outgunned Ukrainian military, Biden has confirmed that more US weaponry is on the way.

“We will provide the Ukrainians with more advanced rocket systems and munitions that will enable them to more precisely strike key targets on the battlefield in Ukraine,” Biden wrote in The New York Times.

A US official told reporters the weapons being sent are Himars, or the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, which have precision-guided munitions and a longer range than those currently deployed by Ukraine.

The Himars are the centrepiece of a $700 million package being unveiled Wednesday that includes air surveillance radar, more Javelin short-range anti-tank rockets, artillery ammunition, helicopters, vehicles and spare parts, the official said.

The US is attempting to help Kyiv’s war effort while not being seen as a direct belligerent, and the official stressed that while the weapons would be used to “repel Russian advances on Ukrainian territory”, they would not be “used against Russia”. 

While some analysts have suggested the Himars could be a “game-changer”, others say they should not be expected to suddenly turn the tables for Ukrainian forces struggling under Russian artillery fire.

The US announcement came shortly after Russian forces struck the nitric acid tank in Severodonetsk, prompting the local governor to warn people to stay indoors. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that “given the presence of large-scale chemical production in Severodonetsk, the Russian army’s strikes there, including blind air bombing, are just crazy”.

Meanwhile, in Brussels, European Union leaders were split over banning natural gas from Moscow after agreeing to embargo two-thirds of its oil to tighten the economic screws.

Denmark on Wednesday was set to become the latest European country to be targeted by Russia over gas exports, following the Netherlands, Finland, Poland and Bulgaria.

Danish energy firm Orsted said Russian monopoly Gazprom Export would cut gas supplies after the Danes refused to pay in rubles, a demand Moscow is making of “unfriendly countries” in a bid to sidestep crippling Western sanctions. 

Also on Wednesday, residents of Denmark will vote on whether to overturn the country’s opt-out on the EU’s common defence policy, a referendum that comes on the heels of neighbouring Finland’s and Sweden’s historic applications for Nato membership  

The situation on the eastern frontline in Donbas, meanwhile, has become increasingly desperate, with Ukrainian towns facing near-constant shelling from Russian forces.

French journalist Frederic Leclerc-Imhoff was killed Monday while covering civilian evacuations in the Donbas.

Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, said authorities had identified a “few thousand” cases of war crimes in the Donbas, including murder, torture and the forced displacement of children.

The key Zelensky aide, who met international counterparts in The Hague on Tuesday, said Kyiv was already going to prosecute 80 suspects for alleged war crimes on Ukrainian soil.

A Ukrainian court on Tuesday jailed two Russian soldiers for 11 and a half years for shelling two villages in the northeastern Kharkiv region. Earlier this month, another was jailed for life for murdering a civilian.

Russia’s invasion of its pro-Western neighbour is also threatening a global food crisis, with Ukraine’s huge grain harvest effectively taken off the world market. 

French President Emmanuel Macron said Tuesday that he and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had urged Russian leader Vladimir Putin to end Russia’s blockade of the Ukrainian port of Odessa.

But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said it was up to the West and Kyiv to resolve the crisis, starting with the lifting of sanctions.

In Kyiv, meanwhile, Ukrainian football fans were set to watch their national side play its first official match since Russia’s invasion, facing Scotland in a World Cup qualifier later Wednesday in Glasgow.

“I am hoping for victory,” said 44-year-old army serviceman, Andriy Veres. 

“These days it is very important for the country, for all people, for all those who are fans and even for those who are not.”  — AFP