Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar killed in surprise encounter with Israeli forces

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has been killed by Israeli forces, ending a year-long hunt for the mastermind of the 7 October attack on Israel that triggered the war in Gaza.

The Israeli foreign minister, Israel Katz, confirmed reports on Thursday in a message sent to counterparts around the world. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said almost immediately after Katz’s statement was reported by Israeli media that Sinwar had been “eliminated”.

His death represents a major boost to the Israeli military and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, as the latest in a string of high-profile assassinations of prominent enemy leaders in recent months.

Related: Death of Yahya Sinwar is boost for Netanyahu but may not end war

In a televised statement, Netanyahu said that “today we have settled the score,” describing Sinwar’s death as the “beginning of the end”.

“We have demonstrated today that all those who try to harm us, this is what happens to them,” the prime minister said. “And how the forces of good can always beat the forces of evil and darkness. The war is still ongoing, and it’s costly.”

Addressing Israeli citizens, Netanyahu said that there are “a lot of challenges still facing us” and that the country must “stand firm on our ground and to continue to fight”. Israel will continue with “all our strength” to bring the hostages still held in Gaza home, he added.

The IDF said on Thursday afternoon it was checking whether Sinwar was one of three militants killed during a patrol, but that their identities could not yet be confirmed. By Thursday evening, it confirmed he had been “eliminated”, reportedly in Tel Sultan, a neighbourhood of Gaza’s southernmost town, Rafah, on Wednesday.

The bodies were found by troops and taken to Israel for DNA and dental record testing.

Israel’s Kan Radio reported that the Hamas leader had been killed “by chance”, and not as a result of intelligence gathering. The station also said the bodies were found with cash and fake IDs.

Graphic photos and video from the scene, broadcast on Israeli media, showed what appeared to be Sinwar’s body, wearing fatigues, with a severe head injury, lying on a pile of rubble on the floor of a destroyed building.

There was no immediate comment from Hamas.

Related: Israel’s prime target: the hunt for Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar

Israel’s Channel 12 reported that an infantry battalion, operating with a tank unit, had identified a group of men running into a building. The forces opened fire using tank shells, and the bodies were buried under the rubble.

It is not yet clear what impact Sinwar’s killing will have on Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Most analysts believe that Israel is now intent on a military occupation of the Strip for the foreseeable future.

It has long been believed that Sinwar had surrounded himself with Israeli hostages to lessen the likelihood of being killed. However, in a statement, the prime minister’s office said that no hostages were believed to have been present.

Without citing a source, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Sinwar had been hiding with the six hostages whose bodies were recovered by the IDF in August after they were killed by their captors as Israeli troops approached.

Israel has spared no resources in its year-long hunt for Sinwar, engaging a taskforce of intelligence officers, special operation units, military engineers and surveillance experts under the umbrella of the Israeli Security Agency. Yet, in the end, he appears to have been killed by regular troops on patrol.

Sinwar considered himself an expert on Israel’s military and politics. He spoke perfect Hebrew, learned during more than 20 years in Israeli prisons, and was the driving force behind Hamas’s strategy of the past few years: to lull Israel into thinking the group had been deterred from fighting, before launching the surprise attack in which 1,200 people were killed and another 250 taken hostage.

Various western and Israeli intelligence assessments over the past year have suggested that Sinwar has long shunned electronic communication, relying on a network of couriers to exchange messages with the outside world from Hamas’s vast network of tunnels beneath the Gaza Strip.

Those reports also said Sinwar had become “fatalistic” after 12 months of intense warfare in which 42,000 Palestinians have been killed, believing he would die, but still hoping to ensnare Israel in a regional battle with Iran and allied groups around the Middle East, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah. It is unknown whether he thought or knew that the 7 October attack would trigger such a massive Israeli response.

Sinwar, 61, was born in the Khan Younis refugee camp in southern Gaza and grew up in poverty before studying at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he received a bachelor’s degree in Arabic Studies.

Among his childhood friends were Mohammed Deif , Hamas’s military chief, whom Israel claimed to have killed in an airstrike three months ago, and Mohammed Dahlan, an influential member of the secular Fatah party now living in exile in the UAE.

Sinwar joined Hamas at an early age, soon after the group’s founding, spending much of his youth in and out of Israeli prisons. He rose through the ranks as an infamous enforcer, in charge of finding and killing suspected Palestinian collaborators with Israel, and was instrumental in building the group’s military capabilities.

In 1989, he was sentenced to four life sentences for the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians he suspected of collaboration. He served 22 years, becoming a respected prison leader, and was treated for brain cancer in 2008.

Sinwar was released in the 2011 prisoner exchange in which Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was returned for 1,000 Palestinians. He married on his return to Gaza and had three children.

The former prisoner was elected by other Hamas members in a secret ballot as Hamas’s chief in Gaza in 2017, surviving several Israeli assassination attempts: famously, after the 2021 war between Hamas and Israel, he posed for photographs, grinning, on an armchair amid the ruins of his house. Unlike some senior Hamas leaders, he has never wavered from a belief that armed struggle is the only way to force the creation of a Palestinian state.

In a sign of the group’s hardening position on ceasefire talks, Sinwar was appointed as head of the group overall after Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s Qatar-based political chief, Ismail Haniyeh , in July.

Israel said it came close to capturing or killing Sinwar in January, when it found DNA evidence of his presence in a bunker beneath Khan Younis, including clothing and more than 1m shekels (more than £200,000) in wads of banknotes. He was estimated to have left a few days before Israeli forces raided the bunker.

Israeli officials have suggested before that Sinwar has been killed, particularly after long stretches in which the leader went incommunicado. Last week, he reportedly made contact with Hamas members in Qatar after another period of silence.

In a statement, Israel’s Hostage Families Forum said: “The Forum commends the security forces for eliminating Sinwar, who masterminded the greatest massacre our country has ever faced, responsible for the murder of thousands and the abduction of hundreds.

“However, we express deep concern for the fate of the 101 men, women, elderly and children still held captive by Hamas. We call on the Israeli government, world leaders, and mediating countries to leverage the military achievement into a diplomatic one.”

The prosecutor’s office of the international criminal court in The Hague announced it was seeking arrest warrants for Sinwar, Deif and Haniyeh in May. All three men are now believed to have been killed.