Martyr or coward? Israel and Hamas offer competing narrative on Sinwar’s death

The video depicts a desperate, abandoned man trying to attack a sophisticated military drone with a wooden stick. Or perhaps it shows a defiant hero who is staring the enemy in the eye while fighting till the bitter end. It depends on who is watching.

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

It was meant to be proof that the man they said was one of the main architects of the October 7 terror attack was indeed dead, and a warning to Israel’s enemies that no matter where they hide, the IDF will eventually get 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 dying as a martyr and a resistance fighter.

Now, Israel is in damage control mode, releasing older photos and videos of Sinwar hiding in tunnels with stashes of money in an attempt to portray the Hamas leader as a selfish man who only ever cared for himself.

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

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

The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been under criticism from all sides over the way the war in Gaza is going. Domestically, it is facing huge anger over its inability to bring back the 101 hostages still held in Gaza. Internationally, it is under pressure over the mounting Palestinian death toll and horrific humanitarian situation in the strip.

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

Hamas was quick to seize the narrative and declare Sinwar a martyr who fought and died for the cause, but even Palestinians who have opposed Sinwar and Hamas in the past said the photos and video show defiance and bravery.

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

The video also raises questions about the way Sinwar was killed. The IDF, Israel’s security services and its intelligence agency Shin Bet had been searching for Sinwar for over a year, getting help from the CIA. Yet in the end, it was only by pure chance that a group of soldiers stumbled upon Sinwar and killed him.

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

‘Truth is in the eye of the beholder’

Gil Siegal, a legal scholar and head of the Center for Medical Law, Bioethics and Health Policy at the Ono Academic College in Israel, said the fact that the video was used by both Israel and Hamas to make a point that suited their respective goals was not a surprise.

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

“Now let’s interpret this fact. One would say: ‘oh, you see this person is fighting to his last gasp.’ The second would say: ‘you 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 cause damage,’ and so on.”

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

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

To counter the portrayal of Sinwar as a brave martyr, the IDF has since released several videos and photos of him hiding in the tunnels underneath Gaza with his family, accompanied by claims about him living a comfortable life and prioritizing himself over his people. The IDF said the footage had been captured by a Hamas security camera on October 6 and October 10 last year and obtained by the IDF in recent days.

Avichay Adraee, the IDF’s Arabic spokesperson, said the IDF found huge sums of money, food and water in Sinwar’s hideouts. “He was hiding with his family in a luxurious tunnel while the children of Gaza were out in the open as a result 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 that cost tens of thousands of dollars.  “While the people of Gaza do not have enough money for a tent or basic necessities, we see many examples of Yahya Sinwar and his wife’s special love for money,” he said.

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

Israel’s narrative had long been that Sinwar left the people of Gaza to suffer while he was sheltering underground, surrounding himself with the hostages taken from 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 and not with hostages, he’s fighting heroically like the last soldier, right, wearing armor, he looks thinner and even with his arm hanging, he lost an arm and he’s still fighting. This was not Israel’s intent,” she said, adding that the videos posted subsequently by the IDF are an attempt to reinforce their preferred narrative.

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

The IDF said repeatedly that it believed Sinwar was moving around the tunnel network accompanied by hostages and said his DNA was found in a tunnel near where the bodies of six hostages who were killed by Hamas in late August were found.

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

The group said Sinwar was killed while “engaging in the battlefield” after having spent the past year “moving across various combat fronts in the Gaza Strip,” adding that “Commander Sinwar and his brothers” had humiliated the Israeli army.

But Siegal said that there was likely another reason for the IDF releasing the video showing Sinwar all alone at the end.

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