More than a year after Hamas’ devastating October 7 attacks on Israel, the country’s military said Thursday it had killed the man it considers to have been the chief architect of that cross-border incursion – raising questions about the future of the war and of the militant group itself,

Since launching the assault on Hamas in Gaza last October in retaliation for Hamas’s cross-border raids, in which about 1,200 people were killed and more than 200 abducted, Israeli officials have repeatedly said that their goal was nothing less than the destruction of the militant group.