After Sinwar’s Death, Israel Has Stark Choice: Declare Victory or Keep Fighting

TEL AVIV—The death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar creates an opportunity for Israel to declare victory and wind down the war in the Gaza Strip .

For now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is keeping his options open.

“The war isn’t over,” Netanyahu declared late Thursday in a televised address that suggested he might treat Sinwar’s scalp as vindication for his policy of relentless military pressure in Gaza , and carry on.

His speech, however, included hints that he might shift Israel’s focus from annihilating what’s left of Hamas to bringing home the 101 Israeli hostages still held in Gaza by the U.S.-designated terrorist group.

Netanyahu is already coming under pressure from the U.S. to treat Sinwar’s elimination as a pivotal moment and revive the stalled effort to reach a cease-fire that frees the hostages—a preference shared by Israel’s military and intelligence services.

Such a deal with Hamas wouldn’t go down well with the Israeli premier’s right-wing coalition and many of his voters.

How he decides could determine the fate of the wider war in the Middle East, the hostages in Gaza, Israel’s frayed global relations and Netanyahu himself.

Whatever comes next, Thursday’s confirmation that Sinwar had been killed by Israeli tank fire represents a moment of catharsis for many Israelis and a heavy blow to Hamas.

Here are the two paths Netanyahu could follow.

Take the win

Killing Sinwar, the mastermind of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack that triggered the war, is Israel’s most tangible win in a year of fighting in Gaza. Israel has mauled the militant group and devastated the Palestinian enclave, but its declared war aims of destroying Hamas and freeing the hostages remain unfulfilled.

Israel has now eliminated virtually all of Hamas’s top leaders in Gaza, apart from Sinwar’s brother Mohammed, who oversees the group’s day-to-day military operations and could potentially become its head now. On the other hand, many of Hamas’s fighters are still alive and have been regrouping and recruiting new members in some areas of Gaza.

Israel’s military-and-security establishment has argued for months that fully annihilating Hamas is unrealistic and that a cease-fire is the only way to save the hostages who are still alive.

Throughout this year, Sinwar resisted a cease-fire on terms that Israel could live with, Israeli and U.S. officials have said. Hamas’s exiled political leadership in Qatar is more pragmatic about such terms than Sinwar was, and more susceptible to pressure from Qatar and Egypt, which, along with the U.S., have been trying all year to broker a deal to end the war.

Top U.S. officials on Thursday signaled their view that Sinwar’s demise leaves an opening to secure the release of hostages and end the war.

“There is now the opportunity for a ‘day after’ in Gaza without Hamas in power, and for a political settlement that provides a better future for Israelis and Palestinians alike,” President Biden said.

“This moment gives us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza,” Vice President Kamala Harris said during a campaign event in Wisconsin. She said the hostages should be released, civilian suffering in Gaza should end and Palestinians should live in self-determination. Just days earlier, the Biden administration had urged Israel to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza or risk U.S. arms sales.

Sinwar wasn’t the only obstacle to a cease-fire-and-hostage deal, but he was one of the biggest, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters. “We believe this is a renewed opportunity we would like to seize,” he said.

Israel’s opportunity to dial down its multi-front war goes beyond Gaza, said Tamir Hayman, former head of Israeli military intelligence and executive director of the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.

Israel should now tell Iran that, if it wants to avoid a direct war with Israel and save what’s left of its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, it should pressure Hamas to come to the negotiating table, Hayman said.

Many supporters of Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition are strongly opposed to any cease-fire deal that lets Hamas survive, however.

“It needs some form of leadership and courage from Netanyahu,” Hayman said. “He will be criticized from his base.”

Fight on

For the past year, Netanyahu has shown he is willing to defy the Biden administration—despite Israel’s dependence on U.S. military support—and resist pressure from Israel’s security establishment.

The conflict in Gaza has helped Netanyahu to recast himself as a leader determined to crush Israel’s enemies, rather than the incumbent on whose watch Israel suffered its worst-ever security disaster.

Opinion polls suggest he still would probably lose elections if they were held today but that he is making a steady recovery with Israel’s right-wing voters, thanks in part to Israel’s series of recent military blows against Lebanese militia Hezbollah, also a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. It isn’t clear that a pivot to a cease-fire deal would do the same.

Netanyahu said Thursday that Sinwar’s death vindicated his decision earlier this year, in the teeth of U.S. objections, to invade Gaza all the way down to its southern Rafah area, where the Hamas leader was killed Wednesday night.

“Now it’s clear to everyone, in Israel and in the world, why we insisted on not ending the war,” Netanyahu said. “Why we insisted, against all the pressures, to go into Rafah, the fortified outpost of Hamas in which Sinwar and many of the murderers hid.”

Sinwar’s death is an important symbolic event, but it doesn’t mean Israel can end the war now, said Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser under Netanyahu and a fellow with the Jewish Institute for National Security of America in Washington. Rather, he said, it shows that Israel’s strategy of continuing to apply military pressure throughout the Gaza Strip is working.

Hamas remains strong enough to attack any alternative government in Gaza, Amidror said. “We have to continue to degrade its military capabilities, to make Hamas irrelevant, not just as a threat to Israel, but to everyone who might come in as a substitute,” he said.

Amidror said it took Israel four years to suppress the bloody uprising known as the second Intifada in Jenin, a city in the occupied West Bank. He predicted at least another year of fighting in Gaza.

The killing of so many Hamas leaders also could make it harder to find anyone with the authority to negotiate and uphold a deal, a problem Israel is also potentially facing with Hezbollah after assassinating most of its leading echelon.

With Israel’s military accumulating tactical wins against Hamas and Hezbollah and preparing to strike their backer Iran, the question is whether Netanyahu wants to stop. He and other Israeli leaders haven’t said how the war ends without a cease-fire-and-hostage deal.

Write to Marcus Walker at Marcus.Walker@wsj.com , Shayndi Raice at Shayndi.Raice@wsj.com and Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com