He was not fighting. He was hiding. He and his men ran from an Israeli patrol, a tank shell wounded them and forced them to split up. Sinwar ran into the nearest building to hide, climbed to the second floor and hoped against hope to sit out the next few hours unnoticed. But the IDF soldiers sent a drone to survey the building, found him and killed him with a sniper shot.
He died trying to hide.
This heroic lie that he died fighting, rather than running and hiding, is part and parcel of Gaza's tragedy for a simple reason: It is the only narrative of agency that Palestinian elites are able to give their people.
"He died defending Rafah," bleet out the defenders of the Narrative.
But he didn't. He died sneaking between tunnel networks and chanced upon by an unusually alert Israeli patrol. He wasn't defending anything, he was moving between hiding places in a landscape whose destruction he himself had meticulously engineered over many years as Gaza's tyrant.
And still this image - cornered at the last, trying to hide in the demolished aftermath of a city emptied by a war he eagerly pursued - is the only version of heroism that the Palestinian national story allows.
The worst thing Sinwar did to Palestinians wasn't his brutality, his willingness to oppress and murder them for his great religious vision. It was this story, this path he taught and forced them to walk, this promise of redemption that could only ever be achieved, he argued (and murdered any who disagreed), through this destruction.