For more than a year, the fate of the leader of the Palestinian resistance movement, Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, seemed intertwined with the fate of the war in Gaza.

The US administration insists that Sinwar was the mastermind behind the Hamas fighters’ attack on the Gaza Strip, which is considered the most effective attack on Israel since its existence, on October 7, 2023, which resulted in the killing of up to 1,200 people, including 311 Israeli soldiers, and the capture of about 250 hostages, according to the official Israeli narrative, and prompted Israel to launch its barbaric war on the besieged Gaza Strip with unlimited and unprecedented lethal support from the administration of US President Joe Biden and his allies in Western Europe, which led to the killing of at least 43,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, and forced all of the Strip’s 2.2 million residents to be continuously displaced, and a large part of the Gaza Strip was destroyed.

Sinwar, State Department officials believe, is the driving force behind Hamas’s refusal to surrender, even as Israeli airstrikes and ground invasions have devastated the Strip and displaced most of its population. His survival has also made it impossible for Israel to declare victory—living proof that Hamas, though battered, has kept fighting, and is not defeated.

“With Sinwar’s death, the path to some sort of truce in Gaza seems a little more navigable,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Thursday in response to a question from a Jerusalem correspondent, because it gives both Israel and Hamas an excuse to soften their stance, according to Israeli and Palestinian analysts and some experts. But major obstacles remain — and any resolution in Gaza will have only limited impact on the broader conflict between Israel and Hamas’s regional allies, including Hezbollah.

Negotiations for a ceasefire and hostage release faltered in part because Sinwar held out for a permanent deal that would allow Hamas to retain power in Gaza after the war. His hardline position was at odds with that of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who sought only a temporary truce that would allow Israel to return to the battlefield within weeks in order to prevent Hamas’s long-term survival.

Some American officials believe that after Sinwar's death, the remaining Hamas leaders may agree to make concessions that Sinwar had rejected.

In Israel, Netanyahu may now claim that Hamas has been defeated without the need for further war.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have suggested that the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar could be the moment for Israel to declare victory and end its campaign in Gaza. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that’s not the end of the story.

The US administration is trying to push Sinwar’s death as a reason to renew ceasefire talks. “There is now a chance for a ‘day after’ in Gaza without Hamas in power, and for a political settlement that offers a better future for Israelis and Palestinians alike,” Biden said in a statement after Netanyahu’s speech. “Yahya Sinwar was an insurmountable obstacle to achieving all of these goals. That obstacle is no longer there.”

"Hamas has been eliminated and its leadership has been eliminated," said Harris, the Democratic candidate in the November 5 presidential election, speaking in Wisconsin. "This moment gives us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza."

Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners are pressuring the prime minister not to accept past ceasefire proposals. Netanyahu needs these partners to stay in power — and perhaps stay out of prison on the corruption charges he is currently facing. Sinwar’s death could be a major political boon for Netanyahu, giving him more political support to continue the fight while Israel has all the momentum.

"It is time to increase the military pressure and step on the neck of the terrorist organization, until its complete defeat," Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right minister who previously threatened to resign from the government if the war ended prematurely, said in a statement.

The killing of Yahya Sinwar is Israel’s biggest victory yet in its war against Hamas in Gaza. It is also a major blow to Hamas, the organization Sinwar transformed into a fighting force that inflicted the greatest defeat on Israel in its history.

Sinwar was not killed in a planned operation by special forces, but rather by chance, which put him in a confrontation with the Israeli occupation forces that lasted for more than 18 hours in Rafah, south of Gaza, thus dispelling the American narrative that Sinwar was hiding in tunnels deep underground with the Israeli hostages.