The commander of the Israeli Air Force planning unit “Nahalat Binyamin,” Lt. Col. S., has disclosed details of several major wartime operations, including the strike that killed Mohammed Sinwar, the brother of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, and Mohammed Shabana, the commander of Hamas’s Rafah Brigade and southern sector.
According to the report, intelligence on May 13, 2025 showed the two men meeting in a tunnel beneath the European Hospital in Khan Younis. The tunnel ran across the hospital compound from west to east, and the underground command center where the meeting took place was only tens of meters from the emergency room. One tunnel shaft was near the ambulance area. The unit had already prepared a plan for such a scenario, and after the intelligence arrived the political leadership approved a short-notice strike designed to kill everyone in the tunnel while avoiding harm to patients, the building, and medical equipment.
To achieve that, the Air Force planned a multi-directional attack using several munitions at different points along the tunnel to collapse it. Because time was so limited, fighter jets that had already been armed for another mission in Yemen were redirected to Gaza. Pilots received a quick briefing on attack routes and approach angles to ensure precision and minimize collateral damage. Lt. Col. S. said the target was destroyed in less than 20 seconds. When Hamas then tried to send a bulldozer to extract the trapped men, the aircraft destroyed it as well.
At the same time, Golani Brigade troops quickly took control of the area and prevented Hamas from removing the bodies of the senior figures. Lt. Col. S. also described a separate front in Syria, saying that when Bashar Assad’s regime began to collapse, Israel moved quickly to plan the destruction of the Syrian army. He said the planning had started years earlier, during the “war between the wars,” and that old attack routes, including some from the Yom Kippur War era, were updated. Once the operation began, new targets were added continuously, and “within a short time we destroyed the entire Syrian army and did not allow weapons to fall into irresponsible hands,” he said.
