Graeme Wood
In 2008, Yahya Sinwar—then an inmate in Israel’s Eshel Prison—developed a brain tumor. An Israeli surgeon operated on his head and saved his life. Today, Israel announced that one of its snipers had done the opposite. Photos of the Hamas leader’s body, half-sunk in rubble and dust in Rafah, show a massive head wound. Sinwar’s killing ends a one-year manhunt but not the invasion that his decision to attack and kidnap Israeli civilians last year all but guaranteed.
Few world leaders have spent as much time as Sinwar contemplating the manner and meaning of their death. During his 22-year stay in prison, he wrote a novel, The Thorn and the Carnation, in which Palestinians die gloriously, with poetry on their lips. The novel’s theme is martyrdom, and Sinwar seems to have lived so as to make his own violent death predictable. The valedictory poem of one of Sinwar’s fictional martyrs counsels stoicism: One need not fear death, because on the day it will come, it will come, “decreed by destiny.” One should not fight what is preordained. “From what is fated, no cautious person can escape.”
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