Martyr or coward? Israel and Hamas offer conflicting accounts of Sinwar’s death

The video shows a desperate and abandoned man trying to attack a sophisticated military drone with a wooden stick. Or maybe it shows a defiant hero who looks the enemy in the eye while fighting to the end. It depends on who’s watching.

When the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced the assassination of Yahya Sinwar last week, they released several photos and a video showing the Hamas leader during his final moments of life and after his death.

It was meant to be proof that the man they considered one of the main architects of the October 7 terrorist attack was indeed dead, and a warning to Israel’s enemies that no matter where they hide, the Israeli army would eventually catch them.

But the decision to release the footage appears to have backfired, at least in part, as it has since been used to celebrate Sinwar for his death as a martyr and resistance fighter.

Today, Israel is in damage control mode, releasing old photos and videos of Sinwar hiding in tunnels with stashes of money in an effort to portray the Hamas leader as a selfish man who did not only cared about himself.

Gershon Baskin, a Middle East expert, peace activist and former Israeli hostage negotiator who used to speak to Hamas through back channels, said the release of the footage was wrong and likely motivated by Israeli policy.

As a negotiator for Israel, Baskin negotiated the 2011 prisoner swap, in which more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners were exchanged for Gilad Shalit, an IDF soldier who had been held in Gaza for five years. Yahya Sinwar was among the Palestinian prisoners released under the deal.

“It’s all about controlling the narrative on Netanyahu’s side – he needs it to illustrate his victory,” Baskin told CNN.

The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been criticized from all sides over the way the war in Gaza is being waged. Domestically, he faces immense anger over his failure to bring back the 101 hostages still held in Gaza. Internationally, it is under pressure due to the growing number of Palestinian deaths and the horrific humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.

“They have no idea that by releasing the video they are cementing Sinwar’s legacy in Palestine and the Arab world as a new type of Saladin, a hero, a fighter to the end,” he said. -he declared, referring to the famous 12th-century Muslim warrior who defeated a much larger Crusader army and conquered Jerusalem.

Hamas was quick to seize on the narrative and declare Sinwar a martyr who fought and died for the cause, but even Palestinians who opposed Sinwar and Hamas in the past said the photos and videos showed defiance and courage.

“I think (the Israelis) were looking for an image of victory, but Sinwar gave them a different image. He was not hiding in a tunnel, as Netanyahu claimed, nor behind Palestinian civilians, using them as human shields, as Israeli propaganda claimed. He was not hiding behind Israeli prisoners or captives, as they also claimed, he was fighting,” Mustafa Barghouti, an independent Palestinian politician and chairman of the Palestinian National Initiative, told CNN.

“And this image will make him look like a hero to most Palestinians and Arabs and to most people who are against the Israeli occupation and against the oppression that Palestinians are subjected to,” he added. .

The video also raises questions about how Sinwar was killed. The Israeli military, Israeli security services and its intelligence agency, the Shin Bet, had been searching for Sinwar for more than a year, with help from the CIA. But in the end, it was only by pure chance that a group of soldiers came upon Sinwar and killed him.

At first, they didn’t even know who they had killed – the video shows Sinwar wearing a mask and military clothing. It was only a day later, when Israeli soldiers returned to the building to examine the scene, that they realized it was Sinwar.

“The truth is in the eye of the beholder”

Gil Siegal, a legal scholar and director of the Center for Medical Law, Bioethics and Health Policy at Ono University College in Israel, said the fact that the video was used by both Israel and Hamas to make a point which matched their respective goals was no surprise.

“The truth is in the eye of the beholder. Objectively, the photo shows a person covered in dust, visibly injured, attempting to throw an object at a drone. This is the fact, the objective fact,” he said.

“Now let us interpret this fact. It’s like, “Oh, you see, this person is fighting until their last breath.” The second would say: “see, this is the stone age fighting the age of startups and technology”. And the third will say: ‘you see, even at the last moment, this person remains violent and determined to do harm’, and so on.

Siegal said there were likely several reasons why the IDF released the documents, including a desire to show that Sinwar was in fact dead.

“It’s proof. For example, people said that Mohammed Deif (the military leader of Hamas) was still alive. There were days of rebuttal after (the death of Hezbollah leader) Hassan Nasrallah,” he said.

To counter the image of Sinwar as a courageous martyr, the Israeli military has since released several videos and photos of him hiding in the tunnels under Gaza with his family, accompanied by claims that he leads a comfortable life and gives priority to its people. The Israeli military said the footage was captured by a Hamas security camera on October 6 and 10 last year and obtained by the Israeli military in recent days.

Avichay Adraee, an Arab IDF spokesperson, said the IDF found huge sums of money, food and water in the Sinwar hideouts. “He was hiding with his family in a luxurious tunnel while the children of Gaza were outside because of his crimes and brutality,” Adraee said on X.

Posting a photo of Sinwar’s wife carrying a bag, Adraee suggested the accessory was a luxury piece costing tens of thousands of dollars. “Even though Gazans don’t have enough money to buy a tent or buy basic necessities, we see many examples of Yahya Sinwar and his wife’s special love for money” , he declared.

Shira Efron, senior director of policy research at the Israel Policy Forum, said the release of photos and videos of the tunnels was likely an attempt at “course correction on Israel’s part.”

Israel’s narrative has long been that Sinwar let the people of Gaza suffer while he took refuge underground, surrounding himself with the hostages taken in Israel as an insurance policy, she said.

“And then all of a sudden what you see is this guy and not only is he not in the tunnel or with hostages, but he’s fighting heroically like the last soldier, right , he wears armor, he looks thinner and even with his arm hanging, he lost an arm and he is still fighting. This was not Israel’s intention,” she said. , adding that the videos subsequently released by the IDF are an attempt to reinforce their preferred narrative.

It is a known fact, supported by Western intelligence agencies, that Hamas has built a vast network of underground tunnels in Gaza, using them to store weapons, to move undetected and for shelter.

The Israeli military has repeatedly said it believes Sinwar was moving through the tunnel network accompanied by hostages and said his DNA was found in a tunnel near where the bodies of six slain hostages by Hamas at the end of August had been found.

Hamas has already issued a statement refuting the Israeli version of events, accusing the IDF of “blatant lies” and “failed theatrics” in its portrayal of the last year of Sinwar’s life.

The group said Sinwar was killed while “engaging on the battlefield” after spending the past year “moving to different fighting fronts in the Gaza Strip,” adding that “the Commander Sinwar and his brothers” had humiliated the Israeli army.

But Siegal said there was likely another reason the IDF released the video showing Sinwar alone at the end.

“Those who lead a revolution, those who lead a military campaign, are usually surrounded by people who support them, people who live for them, people who will do everything in their power to help them. And guess what? This man who supposedly fought for the Palestinian people, the people left him alone. He was all alone,” he said.

CNN’s Nadeen Ebrahim, Abeer Salman and Dana Karni contributed to this report.

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