The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Arabic spokesman, Col. Avichay Adraee, published a meme on social media mocking Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar on Thursday, after confirmation that IDF soldiers had killed him in a Gaza firefight.
The meme shows Sinwar in a famous photograph, seated in an armchair, at the height of his powers — and then in the final moments of his life, seated in another armchair, in an image taken by an IDF drone before he was killed.
The meme reads “before” and “after” in Arabic, and the caption indicates that he has gone to a “miserable fate.”
Sinwar was killed by ordinary infantry and armored corps soldiers in a chance encounter — not as part of a targeted operation.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke Thursday in Hebrew and English, offering a vision of peace to the region in the wake of Sinwar’s death — and offering those Hamas terrorists still holding Israeli hostages a chance to live if they let their captives go free.
Earlier in the war, an appearance by Netanyahu in Gaza, during which he sat in an armchair while speaking to Israeli combat troops. was considered a noteworthy event on Arabic-language social media, where it was taken as a mocking reference to Sinwar, who was thought to be hiding underground.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.