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For months, frustrated American officials looking to end the war in Gaza have mused quietly about the one scenario they believed could loosen deadlocked ceasefire talks: the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, believed to be hiding deep underneath Gaza in the group’s network of tunnels.
Whether that is what transpires over the coming days remains an open question. Without his singular operational control, the group’s constellation of commanders, believed to be holding dozens of Israeli hostages in the Hamas tunnels, could be left to their own devices and adopt a new approach.
Yet inside the White House and aboard Air Force One, where President Joe Biden first learned of Sinwar’s death, optimism abounded that a new phase had opened in the year-long conflict.
“His removal from the battlefield does present an opportunity to find a way forward that gets the hostages home, brings the war to an end and brings us to a day after,” US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said aboard the presidential aircraft, which was ferrying the president to meetings in Berlin.
Speaking to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from the plane, Biden congratulated his counterpart on successfully taking out the terrorist his military had spent the last year hunting. But he also said, in no uncertain terms, that Sinwar’s death should augur an end to the war.
“I told him that we were pleased with his actions, and further that, now is the time to move on,” Biden told reporters in Berlin after he landed. “Move on, move toward a ceasefire in Gaza, make sure we’re moving in a direction that we’re going to be in a position to make things better for the whole world.”
How to strike a hostage and ceasefire deal, and with whom, was still a matter of uncertainty for American officials, who spent the hours after Sinwar’s death trying to determine if he had a successor. Biden said he was dispatching Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the region in the coming days.
Blinken said in August that “the fate of the deal” — speaking to the ceasefire and hostage deal between Israel and Hamas — was in Sinwar’s hands. But US officials stopped short of saying Thursday that his death will result in a deal overnight.
“We don’t know what this means yet,” said one US official, adding there could be “rapid” movement towards a ceasefire and hostage deal or “there could still be a long path ahead.”
“It would help a lot to make that realistic,” a second senior US official said, referring to Sinwar’s death.
For all the unknowns, the moment was viewed inside the White House and across the Biden administration as a momentous one.
“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,” Biden said in a statement drafted aboard Air Force One and sent several hours after Sinwar’s death was confirmed. “Yahya Sinwar was an insurmountable obstacle to achieving all of those goals. That obstacle no longer exists. But much work remains before us.”
Sinwar’s killing is, perhaps more than anything else, the singular event many US officials have pointed to as the biggest potential game-changer in the Israel-Hamas war. Coming weeks ahead of the American presidential election, the death has the potential to transform a conflict that long ago became a drag on President Joe Biden’s political fortunes, and by extension Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign.
Even with Sinwar’s death, there is virtually no expectation the wider Middle East conflict will be resolved before Election Day, particularly as Israel prepares to retaliate against Iran’s ballistic missile attack earlier this month. For many voters, negative views of the conflict have hardened after a year of fighting. Yet any development that could allow for a lowering of the regional temperatures would be welcome, both inside the White House and at Harris’ campaign headquarters.
“This moment gives us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza,” Harris said during a campaign stop in Milwaukee.
With progress towards a ceasefire-for-hostages deal to pause the war stubbornly stuck for months, senior administration officials had hung onto hope that Sinwar might one day be taken out – opening doors in the talks that simply would not be available otherwise.
“It all comes down to Sinwar,” is how one senior administration official had bluntly put it earlier this year as ceasefire talks had stalled.
To be sure, Netanyahu had put up his own series of roadblocks to a hostage deal, generating immense frustrations inside the White House. But the Israeli leader had stated publicly his intentions go after Sinwar until his death. Simply put, US officials have looked at Sinwar as the scalp that Israel needed most to be able to declare they are done with the Hamas war.
“Sinwar’s death would provide a renewed opening for President Biden to again push for the first phase of the ceasefire deal to be implemented and it would increase pressure on Netanyahu to do so,” said Jonathan Panikoff, a former senior intelligence analyst specializing in the region. “For months, Israel has highlighted that Sinwar is the sticking point, that he doesn’t want a deal, and keeps changing prisoner demands in exchange for hostages. But at the same time, there has been significant chatter that much of Hamas is exhausted and would welcome a respite.”
“Whether a deal could be struck for a cessation of hostilities will depend on the new leader, but at minimum it provides space and an opportunity that hasn’t existed for a few a few months now,” Panikoff said.
The ongoing military conflict between Hezbollah and Israel complicates any potential opportunity for bringing the sprawling conflict to an end, one US official said. The US has been sharing intelligence with Israel regularly to try and identify Sinwar’s whereabouts, but it’s not clear any of that intelligence contributed to this specific operation.
“The IDF is more surprised by this than we are,” the official said, noting that Israelis have told them that this was not an operation that they had been carrying out specifically to target Sinwar.
Increasingly over the past several months, American assessments found Sinwar to be dug in, fatalistic about his chances of survival and determined to continue bogging down Israel in a military conflict that has damaged its international reputation.
That mindset had only hardened as the Gaza war reached its one-year mark earlier this month, leaving American officials doubtful Sinwar would ever agree to a hostage and ceasefire deal.
With his death, the path forward isn’t immediately clear.
“This is a big rock dropped in a lake and the ripples are quite extraordinary,” said Aaron David Miller, a seasoned Middle East negotiator who worked for multiple American administrations, adding: “Will this provide the kind of political explanation and justification for Benjamin Netanyahu to seriously consider to cooperate in a way to try to deescalate and ultimately end the war in Gaza? These questions are unanswerable right now, but the ripples are quite clear.”
Among the questions American officials are now searching for answers is who will make military decisions for Hamas. Sinwar had issued orders for his commanders to kill their hostages if under siege by Israeli forces, a dictate that it wasn’t clear would be extended.
“If in fact you are now talking about a negotiation, if there is a Palestinian negotiator on the Hamas side who now understands that negotiations are the only way out of this, if the organization is going to survive in some form, you may have an opening. But you have inertia and you have the need to continue to look for hostages,” said Miller. “I don’t think the Israeli government position is immediately going to default into ‘Let’s stop shooting and now let’s start talking.’”
Sinwar had long lived a deeply isolated existence, often making it difficult for Qatari and Egyptian mediators to reach him as they worked to broker a ceasefire deal.
US officials believed he no longer used electric communication devices and relied on human sources to convey and receive information. For long stretches, American officials couldn’t even say definitively whether he was alive or dead.
“By all accounts, Sinwar has been the biggest obstacle within Hamas to a ceasefire-hostage release deal in Gaza. Depending on who would take his place, Sinwar’s death could revive hope for an agreement to end the war. Of course, that assumes Netanyahu is prepared to make a deal while his coalition openly talks about reestablishing Israeli settlements in the territory,” said Andrew Miller, a former senior State Department official working on Middle East issues.
Biden, in conversations with his Israeli counterpart, had tried to encourage an end to the war in Gaza that didn’t preclude operations to find and kill Sinwar.
“There’s a lot of things that, in retrospect, I wish I had been able to convince the Israelis to do,” Biden said at a news conference in July. “But the bottom line is we have a chance now. It’s time to end this war. It doesn’t mean walk away from going after Sinwar and Hamas.”
Yet while operations in Gaza slowed as Israeli turned its focus to its northern front with Hezbollah in Lebanon, its deadly onslaught of airstrikes continued, causing the civilian death toll to rise. As the US election nears, the administration has begun applying new pressure on Israel to improve humanitarian conditions inside Gaza, which have worsened significantly over the past weeks.
In a stern letter revealed this week, Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned Israel that a failure to deliver more aid to the enclave could trigger a cutoff of military assistance.
How the conflict unfolds in the three weeks before Election Day remains one of the biggest uncertainties for the two presidential campaigns. While not a top-tier issue for many voters, the crisis has complicated Harris’s efforts to win Michigan, a state with a major concentration of Arab American voters. She is campaigning in the state three days this week.
