Three years ago, following nearly two weeks of intense clashes between Hamas and the IDF, Yahya Sinwar was photographed sitting in front of what used to be his house.

In the background, detritus is strewn about — dusty cushions, a curtain rod awkwardly askew and so on. One furniture item, at least, is intact: An armchair. Sinwar’s sitting in it, contumacious, calm and smiling, his legs crossed.

It’s a striking visual. Some Palestinians in Gaza recreated the scene amid the wreckage of other homes in the blockaded enclave, then shared their versions of Sinwar’s iconic stage set on social media.

On Thursday, another image of someone who looked very much like Sinwar circulated widely on social media. The backdrop was similar: Scattered rubble, dust and generalized disarray. But the man wasn’t smiling. And there was no armchair. Half-buried, his mouth agape, his eyes closed and his skull badly fractured, this man was dead.

Whether the image (there were several actually, one of which showed Israeli soldiers gathered around the man’s body) depicted Sinwar’s death scene, I don’t know, but the man’s facial features, his teeth, even some of his skin blemishes, appeared to attest to the veracity of the visuals.

Shortly after the pictures made their way around the world, the IDF said they were “checking the possibility” that one of three terrorists “eliminated” in an “operation” was Sinwar. Unnamed Israeli officials who spoke to the international press subsequently indicated the three men were killed in a gun battle near Rafah. One the bodies was transported to Israel for DNA testing. A preliminary determination, based on fingerprints and dental matching, confirmed that Sinwar was in fact killed on October 16 or 17, a little over a year after more than 1,200 Israelis were raped and murdered at his direction.

The retribution Sinwar brought down upon his own people ranks as one of the worst human catastrophes in living memory. Nearly 50,000 are dead in Gaza, mostly innocents, women and children. The enclave’s a wasteland, menaced by polio, cholera and famine. Children sleep in tents near raw sewage, the elderly are incinerated in “safe” zones were they were herded and the populace is beset by the unimaginably daunting psychological burden of knowing they could be killed at any moment in an airstrike.

Sinwar, like so many Gazans, was born in a refugee camp. His parents were effectively evicted from Ashkelon, then Al-Majdal, when the Israeli state was born. The family settled in Khan Younis. According to a kind of autobiographical drama penned from an Israeli prison, some of Sinwar’s earliest memories are of the Six Day War and the ensuing Arab humiliation.

As he grew older, Sinwar came to view coexistence — any sort of it — with the Israeli state as anathema. His loosely-fictionalized autobiography suggests Sinwar harbored delusions of grandeur, and also just plain delusions. For example, he seems to have fancied himself some manner of heir to Saladin, an ambitious claim to put it mildly.

Sinwar endeared himself to Ahmed Yassin in the 1980s and made his name as an internal enforcer dedicated to identifying, torturing and murdering Palestinians who collaborated with Israel or who otherwise stepped out of line. Some have suggested Sinwar’s reputation for sadism in the service of punishing traitors and disciplining the morally deficient is overstated. I doubt it. And it’s anyway fair to assess that if you were thought to be perfidious or impious, he was the very last person you wanted to darken your doorstep.

As a prisoner of Israel for more than two decades, Sinwar dedicated himself to learning anything and everything about his sworn enemy — the language, the culture, the books, all of it. He took prodigious notes. Sinwar was so uncompromising in his approach to Israeli-Palestinian relations that Saleh al-Arouri — Hamas’s West Bank chieftain who also served as a de facto envoy to Hezbollah before Israel blew him up in Beirut on January 2 — once identified him as an impediment to the Gilad Shalit prisoner deal, which found Israel agreeing to release more than 1,000 prisoners, including Sinwar, in exchange for a single Israeli soldier.

Sinwar, legend has it, was fully prepared to hold out for the release of all security prisoners held by Israel, even if it meant he never went free himself. But Sinwar did go free, on October 18, 2011. So, 13 years ago tomorrow.

Following the Al-Aqsa Mosque raids in 2021, Sinwar’s conception of himself — and probably some Palestinians’ conception of him too — began to change. In his autobiography, Sinwar includes a somewhat mawkish description of his first visit to the site, which Saladin famously liberated from the Crusaders. By appearances anyway, Sinwar viewed the 2021 clashes around the mosque as a divine attestation to his destiny as a great liberator.

Internal documents seized by the Israeli military in Gaza showed Hamas leaders and military strategists, including Sinwar, referred to their plan for the October 7 attacks as “the big project.” But it’s more commonly referred to now as “The Al-Aqsa Flood.”

In a statement Thursday, Yoav Gallant said Israel has “closed its accounts” with Sinwar. He died, Gallant declared, “while beaten, pursued and on the run.” Gallant had a message for the rest of Hamas. It’s over, he said, in no uncertain terms. “The time has come for you to emerge, release the hostages, raise your hands and surrender.” Benjamin Netanyahu indicated the IDF would spare Hamas fighters who lay down their guns and return the remaining hostages.

Over the summer, The New Yorker‘s David Remnick published a painstakingly rendered profile of the slain Sinwar. As I did above, Remnick used a description of Sinwar’s armchair portrait as an editorial anchor.

In his piece, Remnick quoted a Shin Bet interrogator who recalled questioning Sinwar in 1988, shortly after Israel imprisoned him in connection with the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. “One day, you will be the one under interrogation, and I will stand here as the interrogator,” Sinwar told his captor, whose memory of the exchange is vivid. “I absolutely remember how he said it to me, as a promise, his eyes red.”

Following the October 7 massacre, the same Shin Bet officer said, “If I lived in a community near the Gaza Strip [that day], I might have found myself in a tunnel, opposite that man.”