Israel announced it. Hamas did not. On 31 August, Israel’s defence minister claimed that airstrikes on an apartment in Gaza City’s Al-Rimal neighbourhood had killed Hamas’ military spokesman, known by nom de guerre Abu Obeida.
Hamas offered no response. Hours later, it confirmed instead the death of Mohamed Al-Sinwar, 50, a senior commander of the Al-Qassam Brigades and younger brother of Yehya Al-Sinwar, Hamas’ longtime leader in Gaza who was killed in October 2024.
While Yehya, 61, became the face and was the chief architect of Hamas’ 7 October 2023 cross-border attack on Israel, his younger brother operated in the shadows, rising through Al-Qassam’s ranks over three decades.
His face was unknown to both Israel and the public. After Yehya’s death in combat on 16 October 2024, Mohamed is believed to have assumed control of Hamas’ Politburo. Months earlier, he had already succeeded the Brigades’ legendary commander Mohamed Al-Deif, killed in July that year, positioning him as joint head of Hamas’ political and military command in its most volatile period.
His track record was long. In 2006, Mohamed Al-Sinwar helped lead the joint operation that captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, paving the way for a landmark prisoner exchange in 2011. Negotiated largely by Yehya, then imprisoned in Israel and fluent in Hebrew, the deal freed 1,027 Palestinians in exchange for Shalit, Yehya among them.
From then on, the brothers rose in tandem. Yehya, elected Gaza Politburo chief in 2017, became the public face of Hamas. Mohamed, born in 1975 in the poverty of the Khan Younis Refugee Camp, remained in the shadows, running Al-Qassam’s Khan Younis Battalion, reorganising the brigades after Israeli crackdowns, and living a cloistered, securitised life. Unlike Yehya, Mohamed’s face was unknown even to most Gazans.
It was only in death that Hamas revealed his image, months after Israel had claimed to have killed him in May. Why Hamas chose to confirm Mohamed’s death just hours after Israel claimed Abu Obeida’s remains unclear.
From the earliest days of the war, the masked figure of Abu Obeida – wearing military fatigues and a red kuffiyeh wrapped tightly with only a slit for his eyes – became a symbol of Palestinian resistance and an Arab cultural icon, a figure at the intersection of politics, myth, and pop culture.
Abu Obeida first emerged in October 2004 during the 17-day “Days of Rage” battle, when he fronted Al-Qassam’s first press conference, detailing clashes in northern Gaza. After Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, he was formally named the brigades’ spokesman. His first recorded media appearance came in a 2005 Aljazeera documentary. Masked in a black balaclava, he was introduced as the face of Hamas’ new media unit.
For 18 years, he remained the group’s sole spokesman. Yet, it was only in the current war that his image attained mythic weight. Since 7 October 2023, his terse five- to ten-minute statements delivered battlefield updates in plain, cutting language, infused with religious rhetoric and flashes of sarcasm. His credibility, observers note, rested on the shock of Al-Qassam’s incursion itself.
As Israel dismantled Hamas’ leadership and escalated its genocide and enforced famine in Gaza, Abu Obeida’s appearances grew rarer. A long absence last year sparked rumours of his death, dispelled by his return weeks later. But his gaunt figure, visibly marked by hunger, undercut Israel’s claim that Hamas was seizing aid, while also underscoring Gaza’s shared suffering.
If confirmed, his death, alongside those of his wife and children in a modest Gaza apartment rather than in an underground tunnel, will puncture another Israeli narrative about Hamas’ leaders.
The news of Abu Obaida’s death sent shockwaves across Arab social media platforms.
Mamoun Fandy, director of the Middle East Programme and Gulf Security in the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, reflected on the legacy of the most famous military spokesman in recent Arab history.
“The truth is that the mask is not a barrier but a medium; it opens a new text, where absence transforms into a doubled presence,” Fandy wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
“In the world of semiology [the science of signs], what is unseen becomes more meaningful, because it refers to what cannot be grasped directly.”
A silent, hidden face is not a lack but an excess of meaning, Fandy argued, reminding his readers that the power of the symbol is born from its ambiguity. “Without that ambiguity, there would be no myth, and words would remain nothing more than passing sounds,” Fandy wrote.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 4 September, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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