Al Jazeera airs footage of slain Hamas chief Sinwar at different parts of Gaza war

The Al Jazeera network on Friday aired unseen footage purporting to show slain Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar during different points of the war in the  Gaza Strip, some four months after he was killed in a firefight with Israeli troops in the southern city of Rafah.

In one shot published in the report, Sinwar can be seen wearing a military vest, walking through the battleground with a blanket covering his body so he cannot be identified from afar.

The footage shows the Hebrew word “north” graffitied on the wall where Sinwar briefly resided, indicating that Israel Defense Forces soldiers had operated in that home before the terror leader arrived there.

Another shot shows Sinwar wearing a polo shirt, kneeling on the floor of an apartment with another man, pointing at a map spread out in front of them.

In the report, the Qatari channel also showed what it said was the order Sinwar signed to begin the terror group’s October 7, 2023 onslaught at 6:30 a.m. that day.

The massacre, which sparked over 15 months of war in Gaza, saw some 3,000 Hamas-led terrorists burst across the border into Israel by land, air and sea, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 251 hostages, mostly civilians, amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.

בתכנית באל-ג’זירה משודרות גם תמונות חדשות של יחיא סינוואר במהלך המלחמה https://t.co/oyEszVC92L pic.twitter.com/yFTOgXJkxE

— roi kais • روعي كايس • רועי קייס (@kaisos1987) January 24, 2025

Israel has long accused Al Jazeera of cooperating closely with Hamas and says that its reporters in Gaza are operatives of Palestinian terror groups.

In October, the IDF published documents captured in Gaza that it said proved direct communication and cooperation between the Qatari network and Hamas, as well as documents showing that six active Al Jazeera reporters were members of terror groups.

The outlet has fiercely denied Israel’s allegations and accused it of systematically targeting Al Jazeera employees in the Gaza Strip.

Al Jazeera is banned from broadcasting from Israel and was recently also suspended by the Palestinian Authority against the backdrop of the Qatari-based network’s critical coverage of Ramallah’s recent crackdown on terror groups in the West Bank.

Meanwhile, the owner of the house where IDF forces purportedly killed Sinwar said on Friday that his ruined apartment in Rafah has become a macabre tourist attraction for admirers of the terror chief since a fragile hostage-ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas came into effect on Sunday.

Ashraf Abu Taha said he returned to the Tel al-Sultan neighborhood in Rafah late on the night of October 17, shortly after Sinwar’s death, to find the ruins of his house mobbed by journalists and residents hoping to get a glimpse of the chair where Israeli drone footage showed Sinwar had been sitting in his final moments.

“I came at 11 o’clock. I was late, and I found people gathered with the journalists, almost thousands. I wondered what was happening. I found that they had come to take photos in the house,” Abu Taha said.

In the video, shot right before IDF troops killed him and flattened part of the building, Sinwar – badly wounded, covered in dust and wrapped in a Palestinian keffiyeh – hurled an object toward the drone. Israelis called it a sign of his weakness but Palestinians have hailed it a final show of defiance against the more powerful Israeli army.

The chair on which he died has become somewhat of a Palestinian nationalist symbol, Abu Taha suggested. He and his son have placed the seat and a vest they say was Sinwar’s on top of the ruins of their home.

“People are now saying the neighborhood is not Tal al-Sultan anymore, but it’s Tal al-Sinwar,” he said, referring to the name of his neighborhood.

Also Friday, meanwhile, Hamas acknowledged that an Israeli airstrike last summer eliminated Rawhi Mushtaha, Gaza’s de facto prime minister, along with another top official.

The Israel Defense Forces announced in October 2024 that Mushtaha had been killed in an airstrike on a tunnel in northern Gaza three months earlier, along with Hamas officials Sameh al-Siraj, who held the security portfolio in Hamas’s political bureau, and Sami Odeh, the head of Hamas’s “general security mechanism.”

The Hamas statement on Friday confirmed the deaths of Mushtaha and Odeh only.

Israel’s campaign to destroy Hamas and return the hostages taken on October 7, 2023, saw the military target many of Hamas’s leaders including the shadowy head of its military wing Muhammad Deif in a Gaza airstrike, political chief Ismail Haniyeh in an explosion in Tehran, both in July last year.

The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 46,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 20,000 combatants in battle as of January and another 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.

Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.

It is believed that 91 of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 34 confirmed dead by the IDF.

Hamas is slated to release on Saturday four female soldiers it has been holding for 477 days as part of the first stage of the hostage-ceasefire deal.

Emanuel Fabian contributed to this report.

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