Sinwar’s death is an opportunity for a diplomatic pivot

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With warfare raging across multiple fronts, it’s hard to find hope in the relentlessly bleak Mideast. But the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind behind the heinous Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack that killed more than 1,200 Israelis and took hundreds hostage (including Americans), offers an opportunity. President Joe Biden should press Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as those left to represent Hamas to seize this moment and reach a cease-fire/hostage-release deal.

The killing of Sinwar by Israeli forces “was a turning point in the battlefield,” said Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Hamas, he said, “is effectively a spent force,” with 23 of 24 fighting brigades destroyed, along with its aboveground infrastructure. In addition, most of the tunnel network has been mapped out, with about 15% destroyed. While Schanzer expects remnant forces to continue an insurgency, “this is likely the moment where the international community truly begins to pivot to a ‘day-after scenario.’ ”

Whether Iran is prepared to pivot is another matter. Beyond sponsoring Hamas, Schanzer said, that country is behind Hezbollah in Lebanon and insurgents in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere, including the Houthis in Yemen who are crimping shipping (and by extension, the global economy) by firing on Red Sea vessels.

“The wider war continues,” said Schanzer. “The Islamic Republic of Iran has lost one of its proxies that it deployed to fight against Israel since Oct. 7.” What was a “seven-front war” drops to six if Hamas “is truly eliminated, which means there still is a lot of fighting left, unless somehow the United States is somehow able to use this moment as leverage to bring about a more enduring cease-fire that would see the release of hostages, force Hezbollah to withdraw north of the Litani River in Lebanon, thereby creating a buffer zone between Israel and Hezbollah.”

Closing off the front in Gaza won’t be easy and will require U.S. commitment regardless of who wins November’s presidential election, said Thomas Warrick, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative. First, a reeling Hamas will need to recalibrate its leadership, which is important not only for the terrorist group but for international interlocutors, including Israel, since they need to know who actually controls the fate of the hostages.

Some possible candidates include Hamas leaders living in Doha, and Schanzer believes that the Biden administration should leverage its relationship with Qatar to pressure these leaders to publicly call for a ceasefire and hostage release.

There’s also the fundamental “larger question,” said Warrick, of pursuing what would be a temporary Israel-Hamas deal or a more multilateral pact that would include predominantly Arab, Sunni Gulf countries as well as U.S. and maybe even European boots on the ground.

“Only the United States can deliver Israel, and the Arab countries do not want to be seen as having to enforce security for the benefit of Israel without tying it to their larger relationship with the United States,” said Warrick, who added that these countries want the U.S. “to have skin in the game to make this entire venture work.”

On an immediate basis Biden has dispatched Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the region to try to broker a deal while Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris said that the death of Sinwar “gives us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza.”

For his part, Biden, during a trip to Germany, said that “the death of the leader of Hamas represents a moment of justice. He had the blood of Americans and Israelis, Palestinians and Germans, and so many others on his hands.”

Especially Palestinians, some who were killed directly by Hamas’ ruthless rule over Gaza and others who were killed by the Israeli military response that was triggered by the Oct. 7 attack.

Biden continued by saying, “I told the prime minister of Israel yesterday: Let’s also make this moment an opportunity to seek a path to peace, a better future in Gaza without Hamas.”

The war, however, has not stopped, and statements from the antagonists suggest it won’t anytime soon.

“This is not the end of the war in Gaza,” Netanyahu said in a televised address on Thursday. “It is the beginning of the end.”

“We are continuing Hamas’ path,” a Hamas spokesman said on Friday from Qatar. Sinwar’s “banner will not fall.”

Israel is continuing its campaign against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, where in just one week over 1 million people have been displaced. And Israel is still signaling it will militarily respond to Iran’s recent barrage of missiles.

It’s crucial that the window of possibility that opened with Sinwar’s killing isn’t immediately closed by Israel, let alone Hamas and the theocracy in Iran that’s defiled the faith it’s based on by engaging in terrorism directly or through regional proxies (as well as committing human-rights abuses against its own citizens).

In a statement reacting to and reflecting on the news, Steve Hunegs, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, said that “as Jews, our traditions instruct us not to rejoice in the death of our enemies, even one as uniquely evil and ruthless as Sinwar.”

That wisdom should apply to all people, everywhere, especially in a conflict that’s already taken such a heavy toll on Israelis, Palestinians (more than 40,000 killed in Gaza so far, according to the Hamas-run health ministry) and others, including citizens from this country. Hunegs’ conclusion should resonate, too. It reads: “And yet after such a terrible year for Israelis, Gazans and those who care about them around the world, we cannot help but feel a sense of relief and hope that the elimination of Sinwar may bring this war to an end, the release of the 101 [remaining] hostages, and enhance the possibility of achieving a political solution so that the people of Israel and Gaza can finally be able to rebuild their lives in peace and security.”

Such a hope isn’t utopianism. It’s utilitarianism, creating the most good for the most people in Israel, Palestine and, considering the profound impact of the war, the world.