IDF airs footage of Hamas chief Sinwar in Khan Younis tunnel: ‘The hunt will not stop’

IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari in a press conference airs footage showing Hamas’s Gaza Strip leader Yahya Sinwar in a tunnel in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis.

He says the video, obtained from a surveillance camera, was filmed on October 10, three days after the October 7 Hamas massacre.

The footage shows a man, Sinwar’s brother Ibrahim, leading the Hamas chief, along with his wife and children, through the tunnel passage.

The surveillance camera footage showed “the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the chief murderer Yahya Sinwar fleeing with his children and one of his wives through the network of tunnels,” he says.

“In the footage, which was taken on October 10, at the beginning of the war, he escaped with his family underground to one of the safe accommodation complexes he had built in advance,” Hagari says.

“We are determined to capture him – and we will capture him.”

“Following searches, we arrived at the compound where he was staying with other senior officials, hiding underground, while the war was going on above him.”

“Senior Hamas officials resided in the compound in good conditions. They have food and bathrooms, along with safes with personal funds of millions of shekels and dollars in cash.”

The tunnel is part of a major network of passages raided by the IDF under a cemetery in the Bani Suheila area of Khan Younis.

Hagari says the tunnels contained “bedrooms of senior Hamas officials and the office of the commander of the Khan Younis Brigade’s Eastern Battalion, from where he directed the attack on October 7.”

Hagari says the network also connects to tunnels where hostages were held, which the IDF published details on in recent weeks.

He says special forces raided another part of the tunnel, tens of meters below ground, where the footage was found.

“One video or another is not what really matters. What is important is the intelligence that will allow us to reach senior Hamas officials and the hostages. The hunt for Sinwar will not stop, until we catch him, dead or alive,” Hagari says.

He also says that earlier this month troops detained close relatives of senior Hamas military commanders and of Sinwar.

He says that among those detained are the father of Rafa’a Salameh, the commander of Hamas’s Khan Younis Brigade, and the son of Husni Hamdan, another senior Hamas commander.

“In the Shin Bet interrogations, they are providing us with a lot of intelligence,” Hagari says.

Hagari says the IDF was “close to dismantling the military framework of Hamas in Khan Younis. We continue to catch terrorists, interrogate them… and reveal more and more intelligence. The most important thing for us in intelligence is information about the hostages, in order to make decisions and prepare operations such as the rescue operation that we carried out last night.”