For more than a year, the fate of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar seemed entwined with the fate of the war in Gaza. Mr. Sinwar orchestrated the Hamas assault on Israel last October that killed up to 1,200 people,

In 2008, Yahya Sinwar—then an inmate in Israel’s Eshel Prison—developed a brain tumor. An Israeli surgeon operated on his head and saved his life. Today, Israel announced that one of its snipers had done the opposite.

I N THE END Yahya Sinwar died brutally in the rubble of Gaza, like tens of thousands of victims of the war he unleashed a year earlier. In a firefight with an Israeli patrol in southern Gaza, the leader of Hamas,