The ICC’s rogue prosecutor

Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of 7 October, went to meet his maker last week. Having spent a year being pursued through the underground tunnels of Gaza that he had built, he finally put his head up above the surface in the Tal al-Sultan area of Rafah. The world that had told the IDF not to go into Rafah was once again proved wrong. Sinwar was killed in an exchange of fire by a 19-year-old Israeli soldier who was not even in uniform on 7 October.

A couple of days after Sinwar’s demise, I went into Rafah to see the house where he spent his final minutes. It had once been a rather nice villa, owned by a Palestinian family who have since been keen to stress that they had absolutely no connection to the dead terrorist. Sinwar simply bolted where he could and ran up these stairs, trailing blood as he went. From the first floor of the house he had his final view of Gaza.

It is not a good view. After a year of house-to-house fighting there is hardly a building that is undamaged. But I wondered, as I sat in the last seat he had been in and surveyed the same landscape, whether he had thought, even for a moment, about what he had done. Not just about his orchestration of the massacre of 1,200 Jews and the kidnapping of hundreds more (100 of whom are still unaccounted for) but also what this ‘leader’ of the Palestinian people had done to the Palestinian people. He started a war, and told them that Hamas could win it. He tried to annihilate the Jewish state and lied to the Palestinian people that Hamas could achieve it.