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It is only a few days since evil Hamas mastermind Yahya Sinwar was killed in a building in Tel Sultan, Rafah, deep in the south of Gaza.
It was the area that geopolitical genius Vice President Kamala Harris said that the Israel Defense Forces should not enter.
Thank goodness their leaders ignored her. Because as they destroyed his tunnel system and fought their way house to house through Gaza for a year, this was where he was finally found.
On Sunday, The Post was given exclusive foreign media access to the site where Sinwar met his end.
I went in with the IDF along the southernmost part of the Gaza Strip, along Gaza’s border with Egypt. Here huge Egyptian watchtowers overlook the border. It was under this border that Hamas was for years able to smuggle rockets, guns and other weaponry.
As we made our way along what is known as the Philadelphi corridor, we finally came upon Rafah.
Rubble and ruin
The city is destroyed. Hardly a building is left unmarked by the scars of war. Many homes have been blown open along the sides.
Many have the marks Hamas leaves for other Hamas members to tell them they have booby-trapped the building. Many multi-story buildings have crumpled like a deck of cards from airstrikes after the IDF told civilians to leave the area.
It is a scene of unbelievably intense fighting.
After traveling through this scene of devastation for under an hour we ended up at the place I had come to see. The area of Tel Sultan — the scene of the end of Sinwar.
For the past 12 months the mastermind of Oct. 7 had scurried like a rat through the tunnels he spent years building. Newly released footage shows him just before Oct. 7, 2023, guiding his family through part of that network with all the comforts they needed. Comforts he withheld from the people of Gaza.
As The Post reported, Sinwar’s wife was even holding a $32,000 luxury Birkin handbag.
Nobody knows how many times Sinwar came above ground over the past year. But as the IDF made his operating area smaller and smaller he abandoned his last underground complex, leaving millions of dollars in cash as well as food and other UN supplies meant for the Palestinian people.
He probably knew that this was his last run. This is the deepest into Gaza that anyone can go. IDF sources told me that a number of Hamas battalions tried to gather toward him but they were decimated on the way in battles with the IDF.
This was probably a surprise for Sinwar. He didn’t see the collapse of his terror army coming. But as the IDF cut off one sector of Gaza after another he most likely realized that there was nowhere left for him to run.
Pivotal IDF encounter
Last week four terrorists (who turned out to include Sinwar) were spotted by a local battalion of the IDF. They exchanged fire with the terrorists and separated out. Two were taken out by the IDF shortly after. One briefly went missing. The other was Sinwar.
Soldiers saw him flee into a building. On Saturday I saw the telltale blood marks of Sinwar on the entrance to the building he ran into, indicating that he was already wounded by the time he arrived at his last hideaway. He headed up the stairs and tried to hide under some blankets in an upstairs room.
He was already badly injured, most likely having had part of one of his hands blown off. He seems to have tried to tourniquet it, unsuccessfully. But an IDF observation drone found him in his final room. Although a tank round was subsequently fired at the building he seems to have died from a shot through the head. Initial autopsy reports say he probably lay bleeding for many hours.
As I stood in the same room yesterday I had the chance to look out at the final piece of this earth that Sinwar saw.
Every window of the building was already blown out, like every building around it. What had once been a pleasant, even luxurious Gaza villa was now like every other building covered in rubble, when not reduced to rubble. As far as the eye could see were the consequences of the war that Sinwar and Hamas started.
I wonder whether, on this rare — maybe sole — visit up from the tunnels, Sinwar for a moment recognized what destruction he had brought.
Not just on the people of Israel — he was proud of that. But on the Palestinians of Gaza. As he was bleeding out, did he spend any of his final moments wondering — isolated, abandoned and defeated — whether this had been such a great idea? This whole, bloody, unnecessary war that he started?
The chair that he sat dying in was there in the room and I took a seat, noting the blood stains on the side.
There is no remorse to be had for this monster. For he had no remorse for anyone else. Least of all the hostages he kidnapped, tortured and in a number of known cases (DNA evidence suggests) probably killed himself.
Coward’s way out
The fact that he was found with large amounts of cash, passports and UN IDs on him suggests he may have decided at the last moment to abandon the Palestinian people and flee to Egypt.
It didn’t work. This wasteland is where his hate-filled, wasteful life ended.
What did work was the IDF, its commanders and the politicians who have directed them. Every leading Democrat, among others, kept telling Israel not to go deeper into Gaza, not to enter Rafah, to always have a cease-fire and more. If Israel had followed this advice then Hamas would still be strong, half the hostages would never have been rescued and Sinwar would have lived to breathe another day.
It wasn’t “luck” that the IDF finished him here. It was the culmination of a year of hard, grueling work by Israel’s soldiers, and brave and careful decisions made by the country´s politicians.
The region, and the whole civilized world, owes them an apology and a debt of thanks.