The final moments Sinwar's death and the trainee soldiers who found him

The Israeli soldiers who came across Yahya Sinwar and his two bodyguards were trainee squad commanders from an infantry school unit. The fact that it was a platoon from the infantry commanders and combat training school (Bislamach) that found the Hamas commander and mastermind of the 7 October attacks is all the more ironic in light of the fruitless year-long manhunt by the cream of Israel's special forces and intelligence units.

- Julian Borger

Sinwar's discovery in the Tel al-Sultan refugee camp in Rafah on Wednesday may not have been an entirely random twist of fate, however. After his death was confirmed, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed that traces of his DNA had been found in the same area in early September, in an underground passageway a few hundred metres from the tunnel where the bodies of six executed Israeli hostages were found.

The Israeli theory now is that the hostages had been Sinwar's shields at some point and that when IDF patrols got too close, he left that hiding place and had the hostages shot and dumped some way away.

Ben Caspit, a journalist on the Ma'ariv newspaper, credits the head of the IDF's southern command, Maj Gen Yaron Finkelman, a man haunted by Israel's catastrophic security failure on 7 October last year, with following his hunch that Sinwar would not have been able to travel far after the hostages were killed and thus maintaining an intensive focus on Tel al-Sultan.