Yahya Sinwar, brave enough to console those who grieve at his death…

"Among the believers are men who have been true to what they covenanted with God. Some of them have fulfilled their vow and given their lives on that path; others are still waiting (for martyrdom). They have not changed (their word) in the least" (Surat al-Ahzab, verse 23).

Yahya Sinwar, one of those men who remained true to what they had covenanted with God, joined his Lord having added a tremendous beauty to the pledge he had given through his life, his jihad and his martyrdom. Throughout his life Yahya Sinwar lived knowing that death lay at the end of the struggle he was waging and the road he had set out upon, yet without the slightest hesitation about that road.

Like those who first saw the photographs of his death released by the Israeli army, we of course hoped, "God willing, it is not him," but as the details of the manner in which he was killed began to emerge shortly afterward, we saw with astonishment that this was neither a death nor a defeat. With his death he seems to have dealt a new blow, as effective as that of October 7, to the army with the world's most powerful intelligence, military power and technology, which he had been making a laughingstock for a year.

The cowardly and treacherous Israeli soldiers, in the elation they felt when they realized they had killed Yahya Sinwar, were so intoxicated that at the moment they published the first photographs they failed to notice that these were beginning to work like a nuclear weapon turned back upon themselves.

In truth, this was not the end they had expected for Yahya Sinwar, whom they had been pursuing for a year with all their strength in a narrow strip of land. The manner of his death razed to the ground all the narratives they had carefully worked up over the same year and with which they had tried to dazzle the world's eyes. The end they had prepared for him was either that he would be found hiding in a tunnel, or among the Israeli captives, using them as living shields, or, again among his own people, in the crowds, that he would be caught and shot in humiliation, having cowardly made his own people a living shield for himself.

Or at the very least his death would have come about through a successful operation following clever findings by MOSSAD or military intelligence. In fact, even if it had not been so, wherever he had been caught and shot it would not have been hard to prepare a suitable mise-en-scène and tailor a script to fit this narrative. But however the joy of having killed Yahya Sinwar took their reason away, from the very first photograph, published out of a lust to announce it, the way to such a likely propaganda was cut off of its own accord. From this moment on, the images and news of Yahya Sinwar's capture and killing are turning into a new wave of the Al-Aqsa Flood working against Israel.

The Israeli army did not locate Yahya Sinwar and carry out an operation against him on the basis of fine intelligence it had gathered and assessed. They found him not in Deir al-Balah or Khan Yunis, but in Tel al-Sultan in Rafah. Moreover, they hit him by chance, with random tank fire against three armed Palestinians who had been detected entering a house on the battlefield. In response to the tank shell fire, Yahya Sinwar threw the two hand grenades he held and clashed with the Israeli soldiers, and during this he was shot in the hand. Then, as the soldiers targeted him once more with tank shells and unmanned aerial vehicles, he continued the fight, hurling a stick he had caught with his left hand, in place of his severed right hand, at a drone. Do you not remember Hazrat Ja'far al-Tayyar, who did not give up fighting on the field of jihad even after losing both his arms?

According to occupation sources, the event lasted from ten in the morning of Wednesday, October 16, until four in the afternoon of the same day. But the next day, when the soldiers returned to sweep the area, they realize that the body might belong to Yahya Sinwar.

Thus Yahya Sinwar leaves Israel no credit of success or victory over his own martyrdom, for his martyrdom rests in no way on Israel's military capabilities or its intelligence power, of which it boasts so arrogantly and spoiledly. On the contrary, what comes to the fore in this story is the heroism of an honorable fighter who, when he could have fled and hidden, fell as a martyr on the battlefield, at the front, fighting together with, and ahead of, the Qassam soldiers who may fall as martyrs at any moment.

Despite this, the murderer Netanyahu, in his speech celebrating the killing of Sinwar, shamelessly repeated the propaganda of "the man who blamed his people and fled," even as the footage released by his own soldiers gave him the lie. Whom could this possibly convince any longer? Everyone sees how he fled like a coward into shelters while Hamas rockets were probing Tel Aviv, and how his son was spending time having fun in Miami while his own soldiers were being picked off one by one on the battlefield by the Qassam mujahideen.

They released the photographs and drone footage of Sinwar's martyrdom in fact in order to belittle and demean him, but in every detail of this footage, the story of a brave man who fought heroically against his enemy to the last drop of his blood and the last breath stands out in all its perfection.

Since Sinwar's martyrdom does not change the fact that he made a disgrace of them by slipping, as if mocking it, past unparalleled intelligence tracking that has continued for more than a year since October 7, it can never be read as a success story in Israel's favor. Sinwar will go on being more trouble to the occupiers than he was alive. Just as their leader in the wheelchair, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, became far more effective after his martyrdom. The martyrdom of Sinwar or the other leaders has not eliminated Hamas and will not eliminate it. On the contrary, the heroism and nobility in this martyrdom will deepen even further the movement's moral and symbolic presence among Palestinian and Arab masses.

On the occasion of Sinwar's martyrdom, the most widely shared texts and video recordings of what he said about death and martyrdom present, together with his martyrdom, a story consistent and coherent to an almost unbelievable perfection. A man who knew very well the Master of death and of life, who as if killed death, who lived intertwined with death and who could threaten his enemies with his own death. A concrete manifestation of "killing death," which we can utter easily in poems and sometimes suppose to be nothing but literature. He killed his own death and joined the ranks of the eternally living.

Sinwar's struggle and story, whose news of martyrdom we received at the 7th Siirt International Short Film Festival, being held under the theme "Free Gaza," is a story of such perfection that it eclipses the most epic films of heroism. Not only his, but everything we have witnessed in Gaza for a year is something that invites us, in the name of art and in the name of philosophy, not to reconsider everything we know and think, from the beginning. The most that all epic heroic cinema could do may be an imitation of what has happened in Gaza. However much they can do, however close they can come.

Sinwar lived as one of the finest, the most beautiful of the many men who remained true to what they covenanted with God among the believers, and he died just as he wished. Even in dying, he was a nightmare to his enemy, and generous enough to be a consolation to the hearts saddened by his death.

May his martyrdom be blessed.