CNN
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For months, frustrated U.S. officials seeking to end the war in Gaza have quietly pondered the only scenario they believed could break the stalled ceasefire negotiations: the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, believed to be hiding in the network deep beneath Gaza. of the group’s tunnels.

Whether that will happen in the coming days remains an open question. Without his unique operational control, the group of commanders believed to be holding dozens of Israeli hostages in the Hamas tunnels could be left to fend for themselves and adopt a new approach.

How to negotiate a hostage standoff and ceasefire, and with whom, is now a matter of uncertainty for U.S. officials, who spent the hours after Sinwar’s death trying to determine whether he had a successor.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in August that “the fate of the deal” – speaking of the ceasefire and hostage agreement between Israel and Hamas – lay in Sinwar’s hands. But U.S. officials said Thursday that his death would not lead to an overnight deal.

“We don’t know yet what this means,” a US official said, adding that there could be a “rapid” move toward a ceasefire and hostage agreement, or that there could still be a long road ahead is.

“It would help a lot to make that realistic,” said a second senior US official, referring to Sinwar’s death.

Despite all the unknowns, the moment was considered a momentous one within the White House and within the Biden administration.

Perhaps more than anything else, Sinwar’s assassination is the singular event that many U.S. officials have pointed to as the biggest potential game changer in the war between Israel and Hamas. In coming weeks before the U.S. presidential election, the death has the potential to transform a conflict that long ago became a drag on President Joe Biden’s political fortunes, and by extension, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign.

Even with Sinwar’s death, there is virtually no expectation that the broader conflict in the Middle East will be resolved before Election Day, especially as Israel prepares to retaliate against Iran’s ballistic missile attack earlier this month. For many voters, negative views about the conflict have hardened after a year of fighting. Still, any development that could allow for a reduction in regional temperatures would be welcome, both within the White House and at Harris’ campaign headquarters.

With progress toward a hostage ceasefire to pause the war stubbornly stalled for months, senior government officials had held out hope that Sinwar would one day be eliminated — opening doors in the talks that would otherwise simply not be possible. would be available.

With progress toward a hostage ceasefire to pause the war stubbornly stalled for months, senior government officials had held out hope that Sinwar could one day be eliminated — opening doors in the talks that would otherwise simply would not be available.

“It all comes down to Sinwar,” a senior government official had put it bluntly earlier this year, when ceasefire negotiations had stalled.

It is fair to say that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had put up his own series of roadblocks to a hostage deal, causing enormous frustration within the White House. But the Israeli leader had publicly stated that he wanted to pursue Sinwar until his death. Simply put, US officials have seen Sinwar as the scalp Israel most needed to declare that they are done with the Hamas war.

“Sinwar’s death would provide a renewed opening for President Biden to again push for the implementation of the first phase of the ceasefire and it would increase pressure on Netanyahu to do so,” said Jonathan Panikoff, a former senior intelligence analyst specializing in the region. . “For months, Israel has emphasized that Sinwar is the sticking point, that he does not want a deal and continues to change prisoners’ demands in exchange for hostages. But at the same time, there has been a lot of talk that much of Hamas is exhausted and would welcome a reprieve.”

“Whether or not a deal can be reached on a cessation of hostilities will depend on the new leader, but at the very least it provides space and an opportunity that has not existed for a few months,” Panikoff said.

The ongoing military conflict between Hezbollah and Israel complicates any potential possibility of ending the sprawling conflict, a US official said. The US has regularly shared intelligence with Israel to try to identify Sinwar’s whereabouts, but it is not clear that this intelligence contributed to this specific operation.

“The IDF is more surprised by this than we are,” the official said, noting that the Israelis told them this was not an operation they carried out specifically to attack Sinwar.

In recent months, US assessments increasingly showed that Sinwar was entrenched, fatalistic about his chances of survival and determined to continue bogging Israel down in a military conflict that has damaged its international reputation.

That mentality only hardened when the war in Gaza reached its one-year milestone earlier this month, leaving U.S. officials doubtful whether Sinwar would ever agree to a hostage situation and a ceasefire.

With his death, the way forward is not immediately clear.

“This is a big rock that has fallen into a lake and the ripples are quite extraordinary,” said Aaron David Miller, a veteran Middle East negotiator who has worked for several US administrations, adding: “Will this provide some kind of political explanation and justification for Benjamin? Will Netanyahu seriously consider working together in an effort to de-escalate and ultimately end the war in Gaza? These questions cannot be answered at this time, but the ripples are quite clear.”

One of the questions U.S. officials are now seeking answers to is who will make military decisions for Hamas. Sinwar had ordered his commanders to kill their hostages if they were besieged by Israeli forces, a diktat that was not clear would be extended.

“If you’re actually talking about negotiations, if there is a Palestinian negotiator on the Hamas side who now understands that negotiations are the only way out, if the organization wants to survive in some form, then you might have an opening. But you have inertia and you have a need to keep looking for hostages,” Miller said. “I don’t think the Israeli government’s position will immediately be ‘Let’s stop shooting and start talking now.’”

Sinwar had long led a deeply isolated existence, often making it difficult for Qatari and Egyptian mediators to reach him as they tried to reach a ceasefire.

U.S. officials believed he was no longer using electrical communications equipment and relying on human sources to transmit and receive information. For a long time, American officials could not even say definitively whether he was alive or dead.

“By all accounts, Sinwar has been the biggest obstacle within Hamas to an agreement on the release of hostages in Gaza. Depending on who would take his place, Sinwar’s death could revive hopes for an agreement to end the war. That, of course, assumes that Netanyahu is willing to make a deal while his coalition openly talks about restoring Israeli settlements in the area,” said Andrew Miller, a former senior State Department official who works on Central issues -East.

Biden, in talks with his Israeli counterpart, had sought to encourage an end to the war in Gaza without standing in the way of operations to find and kill Sinwar.

“There are a lot of things that, in retrospect, I wish I could have convinced the Israelis,” Biden said at a press conference in July. “But the bottom line is that we have a chance now. It’s time to end this war. It does not mean running away from pursuing Sinwar and Hamas.”

But while operations in Gaza slowed as Israel shifted its attention to the northern front with Hezbollah in Lebanon, the deadly onslaught of airstrikes continued, increasing civilian casualties. As the US elections approach, the administration has put new pressure on Israel to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza, which have deteriorated significantly in recent weeks.

In a stern letter unveiled this week, Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned Israel that failure to provide more aid to the enclave could lead to a halt in military aid.

How the conflict will unfold in the three weeks before Election Day remains one of the biggest uncertainties for the two presidential campaigns. While not a top issue for many voters, the crisis has complicated Harris’ efforts to win over Michigan, a state with a large concentration of Arab-American voters. This week she will be campaigning for three days in the state.