In 2021, Israel bombed Gaza for 11 days in a campaign known as Operation Guardian of the Walls. At the end of the battle, Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza, posed for a photograph in broad daylight. Surrounded by rubble, he sat in an armchair. On his face, he wore a defiant smile.

Sinwar—obsessed with operational security, paranoid about Israeli collaborators in his midst—possessed a genius for survival that inflicted death on his own people. For more than a year since October 7, 2023, he eluded the Israeli Defense Forces as they flooded his tunnels, detonated the passages for his escape, and flattened plausible hiding places. Sinwar’s survival was a haunting nightmare. The prospect of the architect of October 7 posing again, with that wicked smirk, was justification for continuing the war.

That he will never smile again means that Israel has achieved a comprehensive military victory in Gaza, albeit at a terrible cost to civilians and to its own reputation. The Hamas hierarchy that unleashed October 7 has been eliminated. The smuggling tunnels that funneled Iranian-supplied arms from Egypt have been destroyed. The rank-and-file soldiers of the terror army have been decimated. Israel’s only remaining significant objective is the release of its hostages.

[Graeme Wood: Yahya Sinwar’s death was preordained]

The question now is whether Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has enough strategic and moral sense to leverage its military wins into a plausible vision of peace. But before fretting about the future, it’s worth celebrating the fact that one of history’s monsters has met the fate that he deserved.

A suicide bomber destroys himself. Yahya Sinwar strapped the entirety of Gaza to his body. When he unleashed the pogrom of October 7, he did so with the full knowledge that he was provoking a shattering Israeli retaliation. Cutting the border fence and inciting a barbaric orgy of murder, rape, and kidnapping was sure to culminate in Palestinian-civilian deaths. Palestinian death was his goal, and he guaranteed it, by cowardly commingling his army among innocents. In Sinwar’s moral calculus, the more suffering the better, because it hastened the delegitimization of Israel and, in his phantasmagoric view, the arrival of a Muslim state between the river and the sea.

Many nations have pleaded with Israel to end this war. It’s a moral travesty that they didn’t simultaneously direct their pleas to Sinwar. At any moment, he could have attempted to spare his people. He could have surrendered and proposed exiling himself to another country; he could have handed over the hostages and accepted the Israeli terms for a cease-fire, which weren’t that far from his own.

That Sinwar avoided shouldering moral culpability for Palestinian death in broad swaths of Western opinion is testament to his sinister strategic sensibility. Israel possessed superior military technology. But it was Sinwar who possessed the state-of-the-art military brain. He embraced what the Russians like to call hybrid warfare. That is, he studied public perception in Israel and the West—and he calibrated his military strategy to achieve his goals. Around the time that protests erupted on American college campuses, he seemed to harden his negotiating position. U.S. intelligence officials and diplomats told me that they suspected that he didn’t want to end the war, which was advancing his long-term objective of building Western disdain for Israel.

[Franklin Foer: The war that would not end]

One doesn’t need to be a Netanyahu apologist, or even a supporter of this war, to believe that Israel’s critics are applying a perverse moral logic. Israel gets accused of genocide, when Sinwar doggedly implemented an explicitly eliminationist ideology. His army didn’t incidentally kill babies in the course of pursuing an enemy combatant. It did so staring at infants and their parents in the eyes. I keep thinking about the murder of six hostages at the end of August. They were killed even though their lives were valuable bargaining chips in a negotiation to end the war, as those negotiations were headed in the direction of a deal. It was the senseless murder of Jews for the sake of murdering Jews.

Sinwar’s improbable survival gave the Israeli government an excuse to delay thinking about the day after, to deflect the looming questions about Gaza’s future: Who will secure the Strip? Who will govern it? But avoiding these hard questions has only made Israel’s choices worse. Despite the offers of assistance from Sunni Arab states and America, it has not even an inkling of a plan for Gaza. In the short term, the only viable alternatives are anarchy and occupation, both of which are moral catastrophes in the making. But perhaps Sinwar’s death will finally permit a moment of cathartic grief. By easing people’s pain, it could free their minds.

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.”

Sinwar was rumored to have linked his destiny to that of some of the 100 or so remaining Israeli hostages, by surrounding himself with them in case of attack. Israel says no hostages died in the operation, but tens of thousands of equally blameless Gazans have found their fates forcibly intertwined with Sinwar’s. Hamas had been lobbing rockets into Israel for years, and Israel had reckoned that it could tolerate them, especially if it could steadily upgrade its relations with the broader Arab world in the meantime. Sinwar’s October 7 attack seems to have had as its only strategic goal the disruption of that status quo. And by committing flagrant war crimes against vulnerable people, he handed Israel—in a way that a few piddly rocket attacks never would—justification for a war of elimination against Hamas. The very act of having kept the hostages, rather than releasing them immediately, constituted a permanent license for Israel to scour and destroy Gaza in search of its citizens. His insistence that Hamas did nothing wrong on October 7, and would do it again, and harder, if given the chance, removed any remaining possibility that Israel would seek a solution that would spare Gazans from the total destruction of their land.

[Hussein Ibish: Israel and Hamas are kidding themselves]

A common Israeli political frustration is that the country is led by Benjamin Netanyahu, whose wartime decisions are cynical and calculated for personal and political benefit. Palestinians have suffered an even worse tragedy, to be led by someone with no sense of urgency to conclude suffering, because of his belief that violent death is not only preordained but noble. (I wonder whether Sinwar’s long prison sentence, which reportedly included four years of solitary confinement, warped his sense of time and gave him an unhealthy patience, whereas a normal person would desperately seek an immediate way forward, however imperfect.)

What a disaster, to have someone so fatalistic making urgent decisions! Rounds of pointless negotiation between Israel and Hamas were prolonged, then ended inconclusively, because Hamas needed to consult Sinwar, its commander in Gaza, and he was hard to reach in his tunnels. This summer, after Israel assassinated Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, Sinwar was announced as the group’s new top political leader, despite the obvious difficulty of having a chairman so avidly hunted that for him to even step outside might be enough to invite an Israeli missile strike. But the truth is that Sinwar, as the commander in Gaza, already had sole executive authority over the territory, and any other purported leader of Hamas would have had to ask his permission to make important decisions anyway. So everyone waited on Sinwar, who waited for death and was blasé about its timing. That preference fit comfortably with the preference of some Israelis to keep fighting until Hamas is eliminated completely—even at the cost of many Palestinian lives, and probably hostages’ lives as well.

[Graeme Wood: Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination sends a message]

Sinwar’s death will stiffen the group’s rhetoric but expand certain options. By not making any deals and instead fighting until his own death, Sinwar showed that he never softened the resolve he’d exhibited early in the war. With that point proved, his successors will have less need to belabor it. And Israel will have an opening to say that it has accomplished a core objective. It has thus far avoided any serious discussion of what Gaza might look like after the war, and who might step up to secure and rebuild it. Sinwar’s killing provides the first milestone in a long while for Israel might pause and consider a realistic next step.

When the Islamic State lost most of its territory, many analysts suggested, hopefully, that its drubbing would be a lesson to other jihadists: Any future attempt to build a terror-state would end in that state’s annihilation. But those analysts failed to appreciate what optimists jihadists can be. Extreme violence may have failed, but it produced more dramatic results than anything else. The death of Sinwar and the utter destruction of Gaza could serve to remind Palestinians that enthusiastically murdering Israelis will have unacceptably painful consequences for Palestinians too. But Sinwar’s example will also show future generations of martyrdom-seekers that they can, all by themselves, grab their cause’s helm and steer it toward greater violence. And when they do that, no one will be able to pay attention to much else. This lesson could be Sinwar’s most lasting legacy.