After a year hunting its most wanted target in Hamas’s tunnels beneath Gaza, it appears Israel claimed its quarry during a chance encounter in the ruined streets of the coastal strip.

When Israeli troops saw Hamas fighters enter a building in Rafah, they had no reason to suspect one of them was their country’s most wanted man.

For months, a specialist elite taskforce had been seeking the terrorist leader behind the Oct 7 attacks and he was widely thought to be hidden deep beneath the ground.

The troops called for a tank to fire into the building, causing much of it to collapse, Israel’s Channel 12 reported.

It was only when afterwards soldiers found three bodies in the rubble, that they were struck by how familiar one dead man seemed.