Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to continue the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine on Thursday following the killing by Israeli forces of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in combat in Gaza.

Israeli ground forces killed Sinwar on Friday during a firefight, without knowing his identity, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement. His identity was later confirmed.

“This is not the end of the war in Gaza,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, calling on the population of Palestine to stop resisting the illegal Israeli occupation of their land. He told those who would oppose his regime, “Israel will hunt you down.”

He boasted of the reign of terror and murder initiated by Israel, declaring, “The axis of terror that was built by Iran is collapsing,” rattling off the names of the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah killed by Israeli bombs.

The killing of Sinwar was met with unrestrained declarations of support for Israel’s genocidal war by the leaders of the imperialist powers.

US President Joe Biden called Netanyahu on Thursday “to congratulate him on the mission conducted in Gaza that killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar,” the White House said in a statement.

The statement reiterated that “Hamas [will] never again [be] able to control Gaza.”

In a subsequent statement, Biden declared, “With our intelligence help, the IDF relentlessly pursued Hamas’s leaders, flushing them out of their hiding places and forcing them onto the run. ... Today, however, proves once again that no terrorists anywhere in the world can escape justice, no matter how long it takes.”

He continued, “Israel has had every right to eliminate the leadership and military structure of Hamas.”

In a statement, Vice President Kamala Harris added, “Israel has a right to defend itself, and the threat Hamas poses to Israel must be eliminated. Today, there is clear progress toward that goal. Hamas is decimated, and its leadership is eliminated.”

Over the past month, Israel, with the support of the United States, has launched a systematic effort to murder all leading members of Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as leading Iranian leaders, as the US and Israel expand their military onslaught throughout the region. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed by more than 80 2,000-pound bombs in Lebanon last month, and Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran in July.

Last week, Biden held a phone call with Netanyahu to discuss joint plans related to Iran. During the call, Netanyahu informed Biden that “he was planning to target military infrastructure in Iran,” according to a US official, who described the call to the Washington Post.

Following the call, the Pentagon announced the deployment of 100 US troops to Israel, in the first official deployment of US “boots on the ground” since the start of the Gaza genocide. Those troops are to operate a US THAAD missile defense system that will support Israel as it goes ahead with its planned strike on Iran.

On the same day that Sinwar was killed, the US military used B-2 stealth bombers to carry out a series of attacks on Houthi rebels in Yemen in support of the escalating war against Iran.

“This was a unique demonstration of the United States’ ability to target facilities that our adversaries seek to keep out of reach, no matter how deeply buried underground, hardened, or fortified,” US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin remarked menacingly, in a message intended for Tehran.

The US media was ecstatic about the killing of Sinwar, with the Wall Street Journal claiming it as vindication of Israel’s war of extermination. “Mr. Netanyahu has a right to claim vindication” for his decision to invade Rafah despite condemnation by the United Nations and human rights experts, the Journal wrote. It continued, “Israel has shown through its fortitude since Oct. 7 that the best way to deter an adversary is to demonstrate ferocious retribution for murdering its people. It deserves support as it continues to re-establish that deterrence.”

Sinwar was the son of refugees who fled Israel during the ethnic cleansing of 1948. He grew up in a refugee camp in Khan Younis in Gaza. He spent two decades in Israeli prisons.

The death of Sinwar takes place against the background of the implementation of a systematic plan by Israel to starve the population of Gaza as it shifts its military resources to fight against Lebanon and Iran.

Last week, the Associated Press reported that Netanyahu is “considering” a “plan to empty northern Gaza of civilians and cut off aid to those left inside.”

It wrote that “Netanyahu is examining a plan to seal off humanitarian aid to northern Gaza in an attempt to starve out Hamas militants, a plan that, if implemented, could trap without food or water hundreds of thousands of Palestinians unwilling or unable to leave their homes.”

It is clear, however, that this plan has already been put into effect. On Thursday, the same day that Sinwar was killed, Reuters reported that Israel has stopped all commercial food imports into Gaza, cutting off the means by which half of Gazans’ food had previously arrived.

Reuters reported that Gaza received just 29 total trucks of food per day this month, compared to 175 trucks between May and September.

In a new warning published on Thursday, the World Food Program found that 91 percent of the population is predicted to face acute food insecurity, and that 345,000 people will face the worst known category of hunger, known as “catastrophic.”

“No humanitarian food supplies entered northern Gaza in the first two weeks of October, and only a few trucks reached the south and central areas, meaning the situation is likely far worse than what the assessment picked up when data was collected in September,” said Arif Husain, the chief economist of the World Food Program.

In May, prosecutors from the International Criminal Court announced that they are seeking an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, alleging that Israel is using “the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.”

In addition to starvation, the IDF continues to kill Palestinians en masse in Gaza, with 28 reported killed and 160 wounded in an attack on a UN school housing displaced people in northern Jabalia.