The lessons from Yahya Sinwar’s death

As Israel approaches absolute military victory in Gaza over Hamas, those who called for a ceasefire should recognize their mistake.

By Michael Rubin, Middle East Forum

Dental records appear to confirm that the Israel Defense Forces killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of multiple Hamas attacks on Israel leading up to the October 7, 2023 slaughter.

Sinwar’s death completes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s counter-terror trifecta: Eliminating Hamas Political Leader Ismail Haniyah in Tehran and Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut.

Other high-value targets remain—Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Tehran, Asaib Ahl-e Al-Haq leader Qais al-Khazali in Baghdad, and Abdul-Malik al-Houthi in Sana’a—but Sinwar’s elimination is as consequential as Bin Laden’s.

Sinwar’s death comes just over a year into Israel’s campaign to eliminate Hamas and just before the first anniversary of President Joe Biden’s White House declaration that “Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people. Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, and innocent Palestinian families are suffering greatly because of them.”

In hindsight, Biden’s speech represented the apex of his administration’s moral equivalency on the issue. Shortly after, his staff—Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and his principal deputy Jon Finer, and Director of Central Intelligence William Burns—began walking back from his Manichaean view and instead calling for a ceasefire.

Two reasons colored their backstepping: First was a lack of strategic vision, and second, was the corruption of partisan politics as concerns about Biden’s campaign in Michigan and Minnesota took precedence over national security.

As Israel approaches absolute military victory in Gaza over Hamas, those who called for a ceasefire should recognize their mistake.

As Middle East Forum director Gregg Roman pointed out, Sinwar took command in Gaza after his release from prison in a 2011 ceasefire deal.

Hamas used every subsequent ceasefire to rearm and import equipment to build its tunnel system. Put another way, ceasefire agreements, for their own sake, do not advance peace; they guarantee bloodier fighting and more victims down the road.

The United States should never recommend that its friends undertake compromises that Washington would never accept.

I walked through the streets of Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria after their liberation from the Islamic State. The destruction was immense, akin to Dresden after World War II.

Locals who remained did not begrudge their liberation; they relished their freedom from the Islamic State.

If European states or the United Nations counseled the United States to cease operations to allow the Islamic State to regroup or demanded the United States channel food and supplies that the Islamic State would hijack to their ends, the White House would ignore them.

It is possible to defeat ideologies. The Allies “de-Nazified” Germany after World War II and Vietnam defeated the Khmer Rouge in 1979.

The United States, Iraqi forces, and Syrian Kurds together rolled back the Islamic State so today it exists only in Syria’s al-Hol prison camp.

After decades of concession, India’s refusal no longer to compromise on Kashmir increased security and returned normalcy to the union territory.

Perhaps had the United States not sought ceasefires with the Taliban, Afghanistan would be a very different place today. Likewise, decades of self-deterring against Iran empowered rather than ended the Islamic Republic’s terror.

As I noted in Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes, U.S. diplomats seldom self-assess or conduct lessons learned introspection after periods of high-profile diplomacy and so tend not to learn from their errors.

Kneejerk calls for a ceasefire when battling terror groups should be high on the list of errors. Humanitarian aid can be delivered in numerous ways, including in refugee camps outside the border of the territory.

In Gaza, this should have been in Egypt’s northern Sinai. To accept Egyptian President Abdul Fatteh el-Sisi’s rebuff but demonize Netanyahu was morally backward.

If victory is the goal, the United States must never advocate or demand its allies agree to ceasefires until terror groups or enemy regimes surrender unconditionally.