On Thursday, the man who haunts Israelis’ dreams, Yahya Sinwar, was killed by the IDF in Rafah, after Israel stumbled across his hiding spot on a routine tank patrol. While the beaches of Tel Aviv broke into celebration at the death of the Hamas leader, our prime minister’s response was more muted.

Keir Starmer was reportedly among the western leaders – including Biden’s veep Kamala Harris, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz – to join the US president in using Sinwar’s death to demand a ceasefire. That is if you have ultrasonic hearing.

“The UK will not mourn his death,” Starmer told the press, reciting the standard version of the MP’s Prayer for Gaza: “The release of all hostages, an immediate ceasefire and an increase in humanitarian aid are long overdue so we can move towards a long-term, sustainable peace in the Middle East.”

Starmer’s coyness about Sinwar’s death is easy to understand. Destroying Hamas was the blank cheque the west wrote Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 7 October, an impossible mission that would let Israel obliterate Gaza and indiscriminately target civilians (looking for tunnels, of course). They hadn’t expected Israel would actually cash it in. 

“We will only reach [a ceasefire] if Israel is assured that Hamas cannot carry out an attack like October 7 ever again,” Starmer said in November last year. According to Joe Biden, that day has come: “Hamas is no longer capable of carrying out another October 7,” he announced last night.

By accidentally achieving its stated aim, the west has boxed itself into a corner. Israel has killed the architect of 7 October. The only logical conclusion is that it must now end the war – or more to the point, that western powers must stop enabling Israel to prosecute it. But Israel won’t, and since US foreign policy follows Netanyahu’s whims like an arthritic labrador haplessly trailing its owner, nor will the west.

This morning White House officials will be frantically ringing foreign ministers to tell them that Netanyahu is open to a ceasefire. Following a call between Netanyahu and Biden, Israel said the two men “agreed that there is an opportunity to advance a deal to free the hostages and they will work together to achieve that goal.” But work with whom? Israel killed the other side’s chief negotiator three months ago and has just killed his replacement.

Meanwhile, an unrepentant Netanyahu continues to humiliate the US president on Israeli TV, sounding as biblically wrathful as ever: “We have demonstrated today that all those who try to harm us, this is what happens to them,” he said. “And how the forces of good can always beat the forces of evil and darkness. The war is still ongoing, and it’s costly.”

For Netanyahu, Sinwar’s death is a vindication – of his relentless pursuit of war, of his decision to invade Rafah. For western leaders, it is an embarrassment. It proves that their continued insistence that there are clear parameters to this “conflict” – this genocide – was a lie. The parameters are what Netanyahu says they are on any given day, and Starmer’s job is to rationalise that to the public.

In the coming weeks, the world will watch as Israel, shielded by its western allies, widens the goalposts of the war until they’re staked on either side of the Gaza Strip. Next week, Netanyahu’s Likud party is hosting an event with ministers called “preparing to settle Gaza”.