With victory starting to slip away, Deif strike comes at worst time for Sinwar
Hamas’s Gaza leader was sure he was winning as the world piled on Israel and the IDF spun its wheels; now, even if his main co-conspirator survived, the momentum has shifted
Lazar Berman is The Times of Israel's diplomatic reporter
For nine months, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was riding high even as he hid deep underground.
“We have the Israelis right where we want them,” Sinwar told other Hamas leaders, according to a June report in The Wall Street Journal.
Sinwar’s approach to hostage talks was evidence of his confidence. After the weeklong November ceasefire, Hamas turned down every Israeli and international proposal.
And why wouldn’t it? The longer Sinwar waited, the more his situation improved.
Israel slowly, then quickly, became a pariah abroad, as even its close allies called for an immediate ceasefire that would leave Hamas standing.
In May, the International Criminal Court’s top prosecutor announced that he had requested arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
Only days later, Norway, Ireland and Spain declared that their countries would recognize a Palestinian state, giving support to Hamas’s idea that the extreme violence it carried out on October 7 would bring historic gains for the Palestinian people and accelerate Israel’s demise.
The Biden administration also slid noticeably away from Israel as time went on.
After saying in October that he had “no confidence in the [death toll] number that the Palestinians are using,” US President Joe Biden treated Hamas figures as gospel in his State of the Union address.
Biden had pledged to Israel in October that “we are going to make sure you have what you need to protect your people, to defend your nation.” But in an attempt to head off a major IDF operation in Rafah — where Sinwar may well have been hiding surrounded by hostages — the White House subsequently held up weapons shipments, including heavy bombs needed to reach tunnels deep underground.
Shocking Israel, and likely encouraging Hamas, the US withheld its veto on a March United Nations Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip without directly conditioning it on a hostage release.
Sinwar, a close observer of Israeli politics, would also certainly have noticed the growing domestic anger at Netanyahu as the months passed. Protests by hostage families and their allies merged with anti-Netanyahu demonstrations, and more Israelis called for an end to the war — without Hamas routed — if it meant the hostages would come home.
The IDF, too, seemed to be pushing Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire in Gaza, even at the price of leaving Hamas in power for now.
And throughout, pressure on Israel to do everything it could to reach a deal meant that Jerusalem was offering far-reaching concessions to Hamas without even managing to get talks restarted.
Trends on the military front also gave Sinwar reason to sit back. The scale of the IDF operation peaked in late 2023, and over the early months of 2024, IDF forces gradually left the Strip until only one brigade remained.
The war, it seemed, was largely over.
The shift
With the worst of the military pressure ostensibly behind him, and Biden doing everything he could to prevent a massive Israeli operation in Rafah, Sinwar thought he had little to fear.
But something shifted in recent weeks.
Assessing that Israel had indeed gone a very long way in trying to forge a deal, the US began placing blame directly on Hamas for the failure to reach one and for the suffering of Gazan civilians.
“Hamas could have answered with a single word: ‘Yes.’ Instead, Hamas waited nearly two weeks and then proposed more changes — a number of which go beyond positions that it had previously taken and accepted,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during a June visit to Qatar, soon after Israel’s latest proposal was delivered.
“As a result, the war — [which] Hamas started on October 7 with its barbaric attack on Israel… will go on.”
Moreover, the US political calendar has also been coming into play. With the Biden administration focused on domestic politics after the president’s disastrous debate performance last month, there is no reason to expect any drastic new pressure on Israel from Washington before the presidential election. Saturday’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump will further hold the attention of the US media and administration.
The Biden administration seems to be treating the ongoing attempts to restart talks as the last chance to reach a deal. The president took the drastic step of publicly laying out Israel’s offer on May 31, and has ensured that fellow mediators Egypt and Qatar are fully engaged with the effort.
If Hamas does not agree to this proposal, the US may well give up its attempts to hammer out a deal before November, and indicate to Israel that it agrees that there is nothing left to try other than intensified military pressure.
There’s no question that the IDF campaign has been expanding of late.
Last week’s return to Gaza City was a surprise escalation, as Israeli forces moved quickly in significant numbers back to Gaza’s main city. The aggressiveness of the operation could be seen in the evacuation orders, which were issued to “everyone in Gaza City,” not to residents of specific neighborhoods, as was the case in the past.
The Rafah operation, begun in early May, has gone well for Israel, but it has left a significant part of the city unconquered. The IDF has instructed its forces not to cross a certain line — perhaps because of intelligence about the location of hostages, perhaps because of agreements with the US — and they are waiting to take the rest of Rafah. If all hope of a deal dissipates, Netanyahu will likely give the green light.
It is also clear that Hamas’s dream of rousing the West Bank to a third intifada has failed. Though there is a steady drumbeat of terrorist attacks, the number of incidents is down drastically from the year before October 7.
Much of that is due to the IDF taking off its gloves against Hamas and other terrorist groups in the West Bank, but there are other key factors. The Palestinian Authority understands what a Hamas-led future would mean for its own survival and for the Palestinians, and has been sharing intelligence with Israel and arresting terrorists in West Bank cities.
PA officials are openly lambasting Hamas. Fatah official Munir Al-Jaghoub said on Sunday in an interview with the Saudi al-Arabiya outlet, “If Hamas wanted to fight face-to-face with Israel, it would’ve done so in areas where the army is located, and not in places where there are people. Hamas is actually hiding between the residents to protect and save itself.”
PA President Mahmoud Abbas also said that Hamas bears “legal, moral, and political responsibility” for Israel’s war in Gaza.
The influential business communities in the northern West Bank cities of Jenin and Nablus are also firmly opposed to attempts by youths in the refugee camps to establish new terror groups and destroy their livelihood. That pressure is one of the reasons aspiring terrorists have fled south to the Nur Shams camp near Tulkarem, which has since become a locus of West Bank terror.
Hezbollah is continuing to strike Israel, and with increasingly sophisticated methods. Its major achievement came in the early days of the war, as it turned the northern border area into a military zone devoid of citizens. But there are limits on how much it will endanger itself for Hamas, and it is not about to stop Israel from moving ahead militarily in Gaza.
And then came Saturday’s strike on Muhammad Deif.
Walls closing in?
Israel still has not confirmed whether it killed Hamas’s elusive military leader. But the IAF carried out a massive attack on the compound where intelligence indicated he was hiding, seeking to ensure that he would not escape once again with his life. Israel seems confident he was at that location to meet with Khan Younis brigade commander Rafa’a Salameh. The question now is whether Deif left for some reason minutes before the strike.
It is hard to think of anything that would ramp up the pressure even further on Sinwar than the elimination of Deif. Both men grew up in Khan Younis’s refugee camp and joined Hamas at the same time. Deif is — or was — a trusted partner. And, more than any other figure, Deif is responsible for Hamas’s military build-up — turning a collection of terror cells into the organized force that invaded southern Israel and slaughtered 1,200 people on October 7, and the 24 battalions that the IDF has been battling inside Gaza since.
Even if Deif turns out to have escaped again, the fact that Israel knew exactly where he was and determined that bombing the compound was legitimate — even with civilians in the area, because of the essential military value of the targets — should give Sinwar further reason to worry about his own fate. Netanyahu and Israel’s war leadership continue to promise they will reach him, and Israel’s intelligence on Gaza is only improving the more its soldiers map out tunnels and interrogate captured Hamas fighters.
Notably, after Saturday’s strike, while characteristically denouncing Israel for the deaths of civilians, Hamas’s officials were still quick to deny rumors that it was pulling out of hostage talks — indicating that it sees a deal as more pressing than in the past.
If Sinwar is indeed feeling the walls closing in and ultimately agrees to release hostages, it will be at least a partial vindication of Netanyahu’s oft-mocked war strategy. He has insisted throughout that Israel will reach Hamas’s leaders, and that only the combination of military pressure and diplomacy can bring hostages home.
The true test, after the strike on Deif, is whether this military pressure will now finally push Sinwar into a deal.
