Reading the news that Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s pitiless leader, had been killed on Wednesday by Israeli forces in southern Gaza, I had the same sense of elation so many people felt when Osama bin Laden was killed. To take satisfaction in the violent end of another human being, even an enemy, is almost always wrong, but there are exceptions. Sinwar’s death — like bin Laden’s in 2011 or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s in 2019 or Hassan Nasrallah’s last month — is among them.

I’m not alone in the feeling — and I don’t just mean among people who share my politics. In The Times’s report on Sinwar’s death, a 22-year-old Gazan identified as Mohammed said the news marked “the best day of my life.”

“He humiliated us, started the war, scattered us and made us displaced, without water, food or money,” Mohammed said. “He is the one who made Israel do this.” Many other Gazans, perhaps a majority, undoubtedly feel the same way. It is Hamas’s reign of terror over them — which Sinwar enforced through a regime of Stasi-like domestic surveillance and extreme brutality toward anyone who questioned Hamas’s edicts or ran afoul its moral code (including for the crime of being gay) — that inhibits them from saying so out loud.

What is the challenge now? Some analysts think the main issue is whether Sinwar’s demise can facilitate a deal that frees the hostages, ends the fighting and allows reconstruction in Gaza to begin.

Unlikely. Many Israelis, most of all the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, feel they’re finally winning the war; they will want to press the military initiative in Gaza and Lebanon despite the terrible risk to the remaining hostages. Whoever next takes charge of Hamas will not want to make a conciliatory move toward Israel as his first leadership act; it could easily be his last. And the next major scene of war will probably be Israel’s much-awaited retaliatory strike on Iran. We’ll see how that plays out.

But the opportunity in Sinwar’s death and Hamas’s military evisceration is that it begins to open a space for young Gazans like Mohammed to openly and assertively reject Hamas’s brand of maximalist, fanatical, Islamist politics. Sinwar once told an Israeli intelligence officer that he would willingly lose 100,000 Palestinian civilians for the sake of freeing 100 Palestinian security prisoners. He clearly meant it and fought his side of the war accordingly. But after the last year of agony, ordinary Gazans seem less likely to be willing, if they ever were, to serve as Hamas’s human sacrifices in its quest to annihilate Israel.