Somewhere in a nearly collapsed room where walls were riddled with cracks and rubble piled up like sediment layers, Yahya Sinwar might still have been seated in an armchair. Or perhaps he lay motionless, rendered unrecognisable amid the falling debris. The exact location was immaterial; what mattered was that he had become part of the spectacle. His death in October last year was inevitable; no one understood that better than he did.

By Rafael Baroch
Sinwar believed he had come to know Israel from behind prison walls. At least, he thought he had unraveled its mysteries. He observed and dissected its language; not merely the words but also the cadence and the silences where fear met authority. In his cell, he devoured Israeli television, scrutinising talk shows like a devoted researcher, noting every carefully chosen word, every threat embedded in the rhetoric, every subtle packaging of doubt.

Prison was not a place of mere confinement; it was a laboratory; a space in which he studied the anatomy of Israeli power, the methods of interrogation, and the psychological instruments employed by the state. At the same time, on television, he witnessed a nation eager to project strength and technological supremacy, yet internally it trembled and was torn apart by division. Every incident sparked public debates over vulnerability.

In this crucible, he forged his own worldview. He realised that, militarily, he could never match Israel’s technological might, yet he believed in an alternative principle: the willingness to suffer more than one’s enemy. To terrorise, erode, and weaken—step by step, until the adversary was utterly worn down.

He emerged as the architect of what might be called altruistic evil: a destructive force that sacrifices not to create, but solely to drag everything into the abyss. There was no lust for power, no desire for gain, not even an instinct for self-preservation—only a pure, relentless commitment to inflicting suffering on the Israelis.

This evil defies humanity's limits, challenges our notions of morality, and brutally exposes just how fragile and hollow our conception of humanity truly is. It is the ultimate martyr’s strategy: self-sacrifice as a weapon, a toxic symbiosis in which the obliteration of the self and that of the other are inextricably linked.

Yet those who presume to control the rules are deceived in an age of drones and algorithms. Sinwar miscalculated Israel. He thought he had deciphered the state, while even Israelis themselves remained oblivious to the extent of their transformation.

The humanism upon which the young state was built - the humanism that once formed the core of Jewish ethics and law - had vanished instantly, like a light abruptly extinguished. What remained was the same nation but stripped of its illusions.

He assumed Israel would always retain its humanity, that it would continue to question itself, to wonder if it had gone too far. Sinwar banked on a society that once saw itself as a moral beacon, capable of discerning the difference between security and vengefulness, necessary force and a drive toward total annihilation. Yet he underestimated how swiftly a reality without firm ground consigns humanism to storage—perhaps to be retrieved later, perhaps never.

Ultimately, law endures only as long as society itself holds together. When death becomes a constant, law disintegrates into a luxury. And so does the idea of humanity.

This is the essence of terror—not merely the killing of enemies, but the corruption of the system itself. Terror renders laws impotent, dismantles stability, and reduces order to mere semblance. It propels civilisation to the brink, where its moral constructs can no longer be sustained.

The terrorist is neither warrior nor rebel, but rather a messianic figure in the sense of Walter Benjamin—not a savior who brings forth a new order, but one who forces the old to grind to a halt. He is the figure who disrupts history and paralyses all notions of progress without promising anything better. This force does not rebuild a new world but accelerates the decay of the old.

Where the law attempts to lay a foundation, it offers only the abyss; where society promises structure, it delivers indifferent destruction. The terrorist embodies the perpetual state of exception—a condition that never ceases to be an exception. In his assault on order, he compels the state to reveal its barest form: a power that no longer needs to justify itself and no longer seeks to explain but only acts.

Sinwar believed he could force Israel to choose between moral self-control and a dark, survivalist impulse. Yet he failed to grasp that the choice had long been made—that Israel, confronted with its erosion, had already reinvented itself. It no longer struggled with whether it had gone too far but whether anything remained worth saving.

What endures is the image: the martyr, the resistance hero, the architect of October 7, the demon, the shadow figure. All depending on who tells the tale. His death is not the conclusion of a narrative but merely another scene in an endlessly repeating play. This is precisely what Guy Debord described: a society increasingly entangled in meticulously orchestrated spectacles until reality is reduced to mere décor.

The conflict has shifted from disputes over land and sovereignty to a staged cycle of violence. Broadcast on every screen and filtered through algorithms determining which fragment we will see tomorrow. Sinwar is no longer flesh and blood; he is a collection of cropped, edited, shared, and exploited pixels for whichever narrative proves most convenient.

Who still recalls the iconic image of the first Intifada—the boy with a slingshot facing an Israeli tank? Not the actual war, nor the geopolitical truth, but the image of the stone striking the tank has remained etched in memory—mythic and hypnotic, as always.

The image triumphs over reality.

Hamas has always understood the power of the image. The bombed-out apartment blocks, the children beneath the rubble. Not military victories but potent symbols. Sinwar believed he had mastered these rules but overestimated his grasp on the image.

October 7 was meant to be a victory in the realm of perception. It was designed to portray Israel as weak, incapable of defending itself; to sow fear, to deepen divisions, perhaps even to shake international support for Israel. Yet the image turned against him. What the world saw were not fighters for freedom, but scenes of atrocities. Defenceless civilians slaughtered in their homes. The very image Hamas had crafted undermined its moral claim.

Sinwar thought he understood Israel but had only absorbed a televised version. He believed he could control fear, yet he underestimated how swiftly the image could betray him. October 7 was not a reprise of the Intifada—it became an existential threat to Israel and a global delegitimisation of Hamas.

Sinwar saw himself as a master of power: a negotiator, a strategist who knew how to nurture fear and shape momentum. But he eventually realised he was merely a pawn in a larger game, governed by forces far beyond his control. The machinery of spectacle is ruthless: every gesture, every act of defiance is instantly absorbed, recycled into news, memes, hashtags.

The heroic image he aspired to - the fearless fighter - was immediately consumed by the spectacle and stripped of authenticity. Hamas had always relied on maximising Palestinian suffering to break Israel’s resolve, but in an era where images endlessly replicate themselves, this strategy became a vicious, inescapable loop.

Sinwar is dead, yet the spectacle endures. The illusion of struggle, the myth of a one-dimensional hero and villain, continues to feed on our attention. And perhaps the greatest irony is this: while he believed he truly knew the enemy, he never realised that the real adversary was no longer a nation or an army—but the machinery of spectacle, which mercilessly reduces every human story to a bite-sized, meaningless fragment.

And so, the following “Sinwar” will emerge. The cycle will continue, fueled by an audience that remains a passive spectator rather than an active participant. We consume the images, react with outrage, applaud or condemn—and then continue our daily lives.

The war is not confined to Gaza or Jerusalem; it unfolds within the images, precisely as Debord predicted decades ago.