The body thought to be that of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was found Thursday with cash and passports — and with no hostages nearby, according to Israel’s Army Radio.
As Breitbart News reported, Sinwar — the architect of the October 7, 2023, terror attack — was thought to have been killed during an encounter with Israeli troops in Gaza.
As of 6:00 p.m. Thursday, there had been no official announcement, but Israeli media were reporting that all external signs suggested that a dead body that had been found in Gaza was, in fact, that of the Hamas leader.
Soldiers identified a building in which three terrorists were believed to have hidden. They directed tank fire at the building, which collapsed. In the rubble, they were shocked to discover a body that looked exactly like Sinwar.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reported that no hostages were found nearby. Sinwar was believed to have surrounded himself with hostages to prevent an Israeli airstrike.
According to Army Radio, it is now believed that the six hostages who were found murdered in a tunnel in late August — including U.S. citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin — were in fact the hostages whom Sinwar had kept nearby as human shields.
That presents the likelihood that when Hamas executed the hostages, it did so because IDF soldiers were in fact closing in on Sinwar, without knowing it, and were not merely nearing a location where hostages had been held.
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.