Dr Anjuli Pandavar is a British writer and social critic. She was born into a Muslim family in apartheid South Africa, where she left Islam in 1979. Anjuli is preparing to convert to Judaism. She is one of the staunchest defenders of Israel and a [constructive] critic of the Jewish state when she believes it is warranted. She owns and writes on Murtadd to Human, where she may be contacted.
The IDF has video footage from the middle of the night on 6-7 October 2023 of Yahya Sinwar scurrying underground with his family, carrying provisions and some creature comforts, settling in for a long stay, while above ground, his people are about to die in their thousands in a war he would start in just a few hours. When does the IDF release this video? After Sinwar is dead.
Thousands of Palestinian Arabs dying in a war against Israel started by Sinwar was never going to turn "innocent Palestinians"—if there is such a thing— against him; on the contrary, it massively enhanced his stature precisely because he started a war against Israel. However, a leader not fighting the enemy until death, but rather hiding underground, or "sitting at home", if you prefer theological imagery, is shameful and humiliating to Arab Muslims. They can take death, easily, but they cannot take humiliation.
The time to have released this footage was when the Hamas Ministry of Health went hyperbolic with their "genocide" figures, especially when the UN was forced to "correct" their parroted Hamas figures down by thousands. That was the time to reveal that there was no chance that Sinwar would "slay and be slain in the cause of Allah", like the thousands of "martyrs" Hamas was claiming.
Every time Hamas released figures claiming that Israel has killed some ridiculous number of "women and children", instead of going hoarse explaining over and over again how the IDF fights urban warfare with the lowest civilian to combatant casualty ratios in history—which means absolutely nothing in propaganda warfare—Israel should have reported these Hamas figures not as lies, but as ammunition to be countered.
Imagine had we seen this Israeli report:
The Hamas Ministry of Health that falsely reported IDF shelling of a Gaza hospital that they knew was shelled by Palestinian Arabs, today reported that the IDF killed 40,000 what they called "women and children". Yahya Sinwar and his family were not amongst the dead. They are hiding underground in the tunnels. (video runs).
Let them prove that they did not know at the time that the hospital was shelled by Palestinian Arabs. By that proof alone they will admit that they lied. They will leave your claim as it stands. It is a question of trapping your enemy in their own lies by lying yourself, thereby making your enemy's lies work against them. But if you are fixated on correcting their lies with truth, then you're not even in the game. You lost the hearts and minds of the West because while you insisted on hasbara, you left the field wide open to the Arab Muslims, especially the Palestinian Arabs, to manipulate those hearts and minds. We see the results all too painfully today.
Instead, every time Hamas made another announcement of "genocide of women and children", you should have reported it verbatim, adding, without pause, "These alleged Palestinian heroes faced the enemy and embraced death, while Yahya Sinwar flees from death and hides in the tunnels, too afraid to face the IDF." And the Sinwar family scurrying in the tunnels rolls again. This immediately creates a propaganda dilemma for Hamas.
That the Israelis still do not get it was demonstrated once again in an IDF video depicting a severely injured Yahya Sinwar, covered in dust, slumped forward in an armchair amid the detritus of a shelled building. Through the drone camera, Sinwar is seen raising a piece of wood in his remaining hand and flinging it towards the drone, even highlighting the wood as the drone evaded it. The IDF actually broadcast this scene. What could possibly have been going through their heads?
Every single detail of this entire Sinwar death episode is an intense humiliation, not only for Arab Muslims opposed to Israel, but for every one of the many thousands, if not millions, of Muslims around the globe who drew strength from the Palestinian "moment of triumph" on 7 October. The Islamic imperative is to kill the enemy and die in the act. If you kill, but fail to die, you will ignore whatever injuries you may have sustained to try to kill and die again, and again, and again, each time defying the enemy.
Let us take a tour through the landscape of humiliations engendered here:
The very fact that so many Muslims are going out of their way to stress over and over again that Sinwar was not hiding in tunnels, but "faced his enemy in battle alongside his soldiers," should highlight to any IDF psych ops expert a number of Arab Muslim vulnerabilities, not least the disgust at hiding underground rather than facing the enemy.
The video, and many that it had spawned, break the connection between hiding underground with your family for months and battling it out above ground. This gap provides Muslims with precisely the narrative vacuum they are so desperate for, to fill with heroic affirmations that counter their humiliation by Sinwar's death. Muslims are telling themselves stories of Sinwar and his soldiers' heroic exploits in luring the IDF into a trap and fighting them, rather than of the IDF progressively blocking off and destroying tunnels, leaving Sinwar with no option but to surface and try to escape into Egypt, while the IDF hunted them down.
Obviously, Muslims are hurting and hurting badly right now, especially given their hubris around the globe in the days after 7 October last year. Unaccustomed as they are to self-criticism, they are now like people drowning in the ocean, frantically flaying their arms for something to cling to, whether it will keep them afloat or not.
We see this behaviour every time they hit a crisis. Their ideology comes under threat and they go to pieces. Of course Sinwar threw grenades, but fighting in flight is not the same as "standing your ground in battle", which is how the Muslims are desperately trying to spin this. The slightest ambiguity and less is seized upon and milked for every benefit of the doubt they can wrap around Sinwar.
Yahya Sinwar was not killed by Mossad, Shabak or any IDF elite squad. The highest leader of Hamas was killed by the lowest in the Israeli military: trainees and reservists, in other words, teenagers and old men; not yet prime soldiers and no longer prime soldiers.
Muslims do not talk about this. Again, on the Israeli side, why are these heroes' profiles not blasted all over the Internet? Show how many military ranks or years of experience lie between Sinwar and the soldiers who got him. Humiliate this enemy. Tell the entire world that JEWS ARE FIGHTERS. THEY TAKE DOWN THEIR ENEMIES. It is not a policy statement; it is an inherent attribute of this nation.
Years ago, Israel had performed a life-saving operation on prisoner Sinwar to remove a tumour from his brain, an act that came back to haunt them in the worst possible way. Let the memes role. Israel could not correct their mistake by putting the tumour back into his brain, so they put a bullet in there instead. There is no need for delicacy here. Israel saved his life, so Israel owned his life. Israel has now claimed back what she was entitled to ever since her surgeons saved that ungrateful bastard's life.
Yahya Sinwar was found in a ruin, which, like drains and holes in the ground, is an abode of the djinn, places that decent people avoid, places frequented by drug addicts and drunks. Why are we not making more of this? Sinwar's body was carried away in a black bag—good! But why was he carried, rather than dragged along the ground? Do you not see how you boost your enemies? Sinwar's finger was amputated from his corpse for forensic examination. Juxtapose that to the maniacal dismemberment his followers had perpetrated on living people on 7 October. This might actually work on the Western liberals so concerned about the Palestinian Arabs.
If you want to trade Sinwar's body for captives, then show Sinwar's dead body autopsied i.e. picked over - by Jews. It is not the fact that you hold Sinwar's body that is going to make the Palestinian Arabs budge; it is humiliating them by publicly disrespecting his body that will get the outcome you want. Day after day, episode after episode showing Jews examining Sinwar's body. It will work faster if the forensic examiners are female.
But the ultimate 'own goal', where hasbara really blew it for Israel, was showing a badly-wounded Sinwar flinging a piece of wood at the drone. Showing this was truly stupid. Muslims were reeling from all the humiliations laid out above, until they saw that scene. Here is the result:
The last moment of his life while he was defiant, he was resisting, he was wearing battle fatigues, with a Palestinian keffiyeh, injured, bleeding. Yet, when the Israeli drone basically was firing at him [it was not, AP], he threw a piece of wood at the drone itself. Many Palestinian Arabs are celebrating the courageous stance of Sinwar, and for the heroic moment that he basically, he was, he was defiant to the very last moments of his life. Sinwar's defiance even at the, you know, his last dying moment, contrasts sharply with the Israeli narrative, because Israel repeatedly tried to portray him as a cowardly leader hiding in underground, in bunkers and tunnels surrounded by Israeli and other hostages.
That was how Fawaz Gerges of the London School of Economics, "explained Yahya Sinwar's last moments" in that bastion of journalistic probity, Middle East Eye. Mazal tov, IDF. That is exactly how, for decades, you have kept your enemy in the fight.
The final humiliation is probably too subtle for those who praise Sinwar to appreciate. Last year, when his men attacked Israel, 7 October and Simchat Torah coincided. Simchat Torah is a joyous occasion and the Jews would not have wanted their joyous day ruined forever after. This year, these two days fall seventeen days apart, and Yahya Sinwar, as qadr would have it, died exactly midway between these two dates.
His final act on this earth was to give Israel the perfect transition from the sadness of 7 October to the joy of Simchat Torah, thereby cancelling out his own life. All that Israel has to do now to capitalise on this fortuitous timing and reverse the video debacle, is to assert the superiority of Judaism over Islam by carrying out another military feat of Biblical proportions on Simchat Torah 5785. Getting into the habit of listening to people who know your enemies would not be a bad New Year's resolution either.
Ed. Note: It is not all bad. The social media noise about his wife's expensive handbag and the film of the family going into hiding was a somewhat belated attempt at successful hasbara.