TEHRAN — Palestinian Resistance factions on Friday marked two years since the martyrdom of Yahya Sinwar, honoring the Hamas leader who fell fighting in Rafah while Israel’s genocidal campaign on Gaza continues under a ceasefire in name only.
In a statement issued on October 16, Hamas called his death “an inspiring revolutionary scene on the path to freedom” and said it opened “a new phase of confrontation with the criminal occupation.”
“A new phase is taking shape across the region, forging a new reality in the blood of its people and in favor of those striving for freedom and independence,” the movement added.
The Palestinian Resistance Committees remembered a man who “lived for his people and his cause” and whose life, they said, was “an expression of a firm national will that rejects submission and humiliation.”
He died on October 16, 2024, in Rafah’s Tal al-Sultan area, in combat gear, throwing his last grenades at Israeli soldiers and then a stick at a drone. Many observers have noted that such an end earned him a lasting place in Palestinian memory.
Born in 1962 in the Khan Younis refugee camp to a family expelled from al-Majdal in 1948, Sinwar belonged to Hamas’s founding generation and spent more than 20 years in Israeli prisons before the 2011 Wafa al-Ahrar exchange.
He headed Hamas in Gaza from 2017 and, after Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in July 2024, led the movement inside and outside Palestine.
Israel assassinated Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 2004 and his successor Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi weeks later, and Hamas went on to win the 2006 elections.
Two years after Sinwar’s death, Hamas reiterated that the sacrifices borne by the Palestinian people are part of a historical struggle against foreign occupation, maintaining that true liberation requires facing the full weight of Israeli aggression with unyielding resistance.
Decades of targeted assassinations have failed to break the national will, even as Israeli aggression escalates into unprecedented devastation on the ground.
Gaza Health Ministry counts over 74,300 killed and over 175,000 wounded since October 2023, including at least 1,481 killed since the October 2025 truce.
The UN human rights office verified 1,076 deaths between the ceasefire and July, 268 of them children, and warned of possible war crimes. Israel holds roughly 60 percent of the Strip.
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