The New York Times quoted the director of the Israeli National Institute of Forensic Medicine, Dr. Chen Kugel, who supervised the autopsy of the Hamas leader, as saying that Yahya Sinwar was killed by a “bullet to the head.”

"Shrapnel, possibly from a small rocket or tank shell, had earlier struck Sinwar's arm, causing bleeding that he was trying to stop using an electric wire as a tourniquet," Coogle added in an interview with the newspaper on Friday.

"Sinwar's use of the wire as a headband did not work, and his arm was shattered," Coogle told the newspaper.

The newspaper pointed out that there are unclear details in the incident of Sinwar's killing, such as "who fired the bullet, when, and with what weapon."

The Israeli military said Sinwar was killed by soldiers on a routine operation on Wednesday, adding that soldiers from the 828th Brigade (Beslach) were moving through the city of Rafah when they came across three Palestinian gunmen. The Israeli military said that while the soldiers pursued them, Sinwar became separated from the other two.

In a video shot by an Israeli drone, Sinwar sits alone, badly wounded and covered in dust amid the rubble of a building in the Gaza Strip, wrapped in a keffiyeh and staring directly into the camera. Israeli officials say the man was Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader.

The stare lasted about 20 seconds, then the man weakly but defiantly threw a broken piece of wood toward the drone. “Shortly after, officials say, an Israeli soldier shot himself in the head, and a tank shell destroyed part of the building,” the newspaper reported.

“Thus ended the long search for one of the world’s most wanted men, which began hours after the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that Sinwar helped organize, and ended amid the destruction of a neighborhood in Rafah that resembles many parts of Gaza, and which Israeli military forces razed to the ground the year after,” the newspaper said.

"Israeli commandos and spies, as well as a special unit set up within the headquarters of the Israeli internal security service (Shin Bet) and the Central Intelligence Agency, took part in the manhunt. It used a sophisticated electronic surveillance network and ground-penetrating radar provided by the United States," the newspaper said.

New details have emerged about Sinwar's movements over the past year since his death, including the fact that Israeli intelligence officers have seen mounting evidence since August that Sinwar, or perhaps other senior Hamas leaders, may be in the Tel al-Sultan neighborhood of Rafah.

They observed people moving around with their faces covered, sometimes surrounded by what appeared to be guards, suggesting they were senior Hamas officials. In September, they found Sinwar’s DNA in urine collected from a tunnel, the newspaper claimed.

Sinwar was eventually discovered and killed in the Tel al-Sultan neighborhood of Rafah by chance, by a group of troops on a routine patrol. But Israeli forces had spent weeks combing the neighborhood based on intelligence that senior Hamas officials were hiding there, possibly with Israeli hostages.

Sinwar died above ground, a few hundred meters from a tunnel complex where he had been hiding this summer, according to Israeli officials, where six Israeli hostages were killed in late August.

This narrative of the hunt for Sinwar, and his eventual killing on Wednesday, is based on interviews with Israeli and American government officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence operations, as well as classified Israeli government documents obtained by The New York Times.

The newspaper says that Sinwar has been a ghostly presence since the attacks led by Hamas on October 7 of last year, and there have been only glimpses of him over the past year, and it is believed that he spent most of it moving from place to place, but experts believe that the way Sinwar was killed, in his military uniform, with his personal weapon, and with a small group, indicates that he fought alongside the movement’s fighters during the past year.

"However, he led Hamas forces in an ongoing war and was able to play an active role in negotiations for a ceasefire and the release of Israeli hostages," the newspaper said.