Israel often holds the corpses of Palestinians, hoping to use them in a future exchange with Hamas or other militant groups, just as Hamas has done with the bodies of hostages killed on or after the Hamas-led attack in Israel. It remains to be seen whether Mr. Sinwar’s body will be held, released back to Hamas or otherwise interred.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

When asked about an exchange, experts said it is unlikely that Israeli officials would create a situation where his body would be laid to rest in a place that could become a shrine.

“What I would imagine would happen is there will be a secret dignified burial in an undisclosed place,” said Jon B. Alterman, the director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, adding “when bin Laden was killed, he received a dignified Muslim funeral.”

When Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was killed in 2011 by U.S. forces, he was quickly buried at sea. That was likely done to avoid the possibility of a shrine, in accordance with Muslim tradition, which requires burial within 24 hours of death.

Dr. Kugel estimated that Mr. Sinwar’s autopsy took place between 24 to 36 hours after death, but he could not specify an exact time.

Mr. Alterman said that Israeli officials likely have robust protocols in place to deal with the deaths of militants. “There will be a huge Israeli effort to make sure there is nothing left to be an object of veneration,” he said.

The burial site will likely be in Israel, he said, and Israelis will want to avoid a situation where his supporters could try to claim he was buried in Palestinian territories as a martyr.

When Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated in Iran in late July, Israelis did not have custody of his body. Mr. Haniyeh was buried in Qatar’s capital city, Doha, where hundreds of mourners reportedly lined the streets as his coffin, draped in a Palestinian flag, passed through the streets.

Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.

The items range from the ordinary, including religious materials, to the operational, including firearms and a map. A number of identification documents were also found, including those of Mahmoud Hamdan, a Hamas leader the Israeli military claimed to have killed in September. The Israeli military said on Friday that this claim was inaccurate, and Mr. Hamdan was actually killed on Friday in Rafah, near where Mr. Sinwar was located.

The documents also include an expired passport for a man whose occupation was listed as “UNRWA teacher,” referring to the United Nations agency that supports Palestinian refugees.

According to the leader of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, the man left Gaza for Egypt earlier this year. It was unclear why the identification documents would be near the bodies of Mr. Sinwar and the other Hamas militants.

The Times identified the locations written on a hand-drawn map that the official said was found near Mr. Sinwar. The map shows numerous locations in the Tel al-Sultan neighborhood of northern Rafah, the same area where Mr. Sinwar was killed. The house where Mr. Sinwar was killed is not included on the map.

Neil Collier contributed reporting.

“The olive harvest is an economic lifeline for tens of thousands of Palestinian families in the West Bank,” Mr. Laerke said, warning that Israeli settlers were increasingly endangering Palestinian farmers, land and production and that “Israeli forces have been using lethal warlike tactics” in the territory. He said that the Israeli military, as the occupying power, had a legal obligation to protect Palestinians in the territory but had at times been complicit in the increased violence.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health said on Thursday that the woman, Hanan Abd Rahman Abu Salameh, 59, was shot by Israeli military fire. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that her family said she had been working in a grove about 200 yards from the Israeli-built separation barrier when a man in a military uniform shot her in the back. Haaretz and Times of Israel reported that a deputy commander had been suspended and that it had opened an investigation. In response to a query about the death, the Israeli military said it was looking into the reports.

There have been at least 32 settler attacks in the West Bank since the start of October that have led to casualties, property damage or both, Mr. Laerke said.

Most of those were related to the olive harvest, according to OCHA’s latest weekly update on the West Bank on Thursday. “Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians or prevented them from gaining access to their lands and damaged trees, stole crops and harvesting tools,” the report said, adding that about 600 trees and saplings were raided or vandalized, affecting farmers in about 15 communities.

The agency’s warnings followed on the heels of other, similar alarms.

The U.N.’s high commission on human rights, in a statement on Wednesday, called it “the most dangerous olive season ever” for Palestinian farmers, citing agency experts and recalling that last year’s harvest had been “marred by a sharp increase in movement restrictions and violence by Israeli forces and settlers.”

The U.N. has recorded more than 1,400 attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinian communities since the war in the other Palestinian territory, Gaza, began last October after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on southern Israel, and Israeli forces have conducted raids and strikes in the West Bank against what they identify as terrorists.

The British foreign secretary, David Lammy, alluded to the issue in a statement on Tuesday announcing the imposition of financial sanctions on settlers and groups identified as supporting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. Mr. Lammy expressed concern that the rising settler violence could worsen during the harvest, which he said had “traditionally suffered spikes in violence as organized settler groups disrupt and attack Palestinians.”

And a dozen diplomatic missions in Jerusalem and Ramallah — including those from Canada, France, Germany and the European Union — released a joint statement on Monday that called on Israel to “ensure a successful olive harvest” and fulfill its obligation to protect Palestinians in the West Bank.

“It is the responsibility of Israeli security forces to actively prevent Israeli settlers from entering Palestinian olive groves to disrupt the harvest,” the statement said.

More than 2.7 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, alongside about 500,000 Jewish settlers. Israel seized control of the territory from Jordan in 1967 during a war with three Arab states. Israeli Jews have moved in since in increasing numbers, residing there with both tacit and explicit government approval. The far-right government of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has expanded Israeli settlements in the West Bank, despite international declarations that they are illegal.

Some government ministers — including the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich — have been explicit about implementing policies to speed up Israeli settlement in the territory to thwart the creation of a Palestinian state, emboldening extreme elements of the settler movement and increasingly blurring the line between the state and the settlers’ actions.

In an interview published by France’s Le Figaro newspaper a day earlier, the Iranian parliament speaker, Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, was quoted as saying that his government was ready to negotiate with France on the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1701, a U.N. agreement that ended the last war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006 and is seen as a precondition for a cease-fire in Lebanon.

“The issue of negotiating to implement international resolution 1701 is being undertaken by the Lebanese state,” Mr. Mikati said in response, referring to the U.N. agreement. “Everyone is required to support it in this direction, not to seek to impose new mandates.”

The 2006 agreement called for a withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon and said that only the Lebanese army and U.N. peacekeepers could operate militarily in southern Lebanon. It has widely been considered ineffective but has come into focus again during the current conflict.

Since the Hamas-led attack into Israel last year, Israel has been exchanging cross-border fire with Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group and political party. The conflict has escalated sharply in recent weeks, leading Israel to invade southern Lebanon in a bid to destroy the group’s border infrastructure.

Although Mr. Ghalibaf’s chief adviser, Mahdi Mohammadi, later denied the remarks, it was too late to defuse the diplomatic tensions and Tehran’s envoy in Beirut was summoned to offer clarification. Lebanese officials stressed during the meeting that the country needed to preserve its sovereignty as it pursued a diplomatic solution to the conflict, according to a statement by Lebanon’s foreign ministry.

Mr. Mikati has repeatedly affirmed his government’s commitment to the full implementation of the U.N. agreement in an attempt to bring an end to the violence in Lebanon that has killed thousands and displaced over one million. However, Lebanon’s crisis-racked caretaker government is deemed largely powerless to rein in Hezbollah.

The man, nearly motionless, watches as he is filmed, apparently recognizing the hovering Israeli drone for what it is. In his left hand he lifts a long object, possibly a stick, and puts it back down.

Then, after staring at the drone for at least 20 seconds, he defiantly throws the object at it. The video ends a few seconds later.

The Israeli military, which released the video, said it shows the last moments of Mr. Sinwar, an architect of the Oct. 7 attacks, before he was killed in Rafah on Wednesday. While the room, the man’s clothing and the arm injury broadly match other visual evidence of Mr. Sinwar’s death, The Times could not independently verify his identity in the video.

In modern warfare, militaries use drones to scope out enemy positions, and often release propaganda videos showing enemy soldiers being killed. On the battlefields in Ukraine, both sides in that conflict have released a steady stream of drone footage showing panicked soldiers moments before their deaths.

But here the drone footage shows a solitary figure remarkably close-up. In a war often seen from far away, in large explosions or wide vistas of broken buildings, the moment is remarkably personal.

There are many unknown details about the video, which was heavily edited before it was released. It does not show how the man’s arm was injured, nor does it show the moment of his death.

At the beginning of the clip, the drone enters a residential building in the Tel al-Sultan neighborhood of Rafah, in southern Gaza, through a second-story window.

Photos of the building taken later show more damage, indicating that an explosion occurred at some point after the drone footage was taken.

In another video released by the Israeli military, two tanks are positioned nearby, one of which fires on the building.

Mr. Sinwar was killed soon after the drone footage was recorded. A sniper shot him in the head, and then a tank shell flattened much of the building, the military said.

Reporting was contributed by Christiaan Triebert.

It was not possible to determine the source of that footage. But The Times confirmed that it depicted the same demolition shown in another video, published by an Israeli radio station, in which Israeli soldiers give thumbs-up signs as they watch the destruction of the buildings on a drone controller screen.

In a series of posts on social media, the Israeli military said that its soldiers had “dismantled” a tunnel network used by Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force on Wednesday, saying that it ran through “the heart of a village.” Accompanying the statement was aerial footage that showed several explosions and smoke rising from the village. The statement did not name the location, but The Times geolocated the video to Mhaibib. Hezbollah has made no public comment on the Israeli assertion, and the Israeli military, asked about the village on Friday, said that it was “checking.”

Satellite imagery of the village captured before and after the detonations show that only a couple of buildings are left standing after the Israeli operation, which the military’s statement said had been carried out by the 91st Division.

One of structures that appears to still be standing is an ancient shrine that has attracted pilgrims from around the region. It is dedicated to Benjamin, a son of Jacob, whom Islam regards as a prophet. It was not possible to determine from the images whether the shrine had been damaged.

Mhaibib, which sits atop a hillside overlooking the Israeli border, was the scene of heavy fighting in 2006, during a monthlong war between Israel and Hezbollah. Over the last year, it has been hit repeatedly by strikes as the Israeli military battles cross-border fire from Hezbollah, which began just after its fellow Iranian-backed militant group Hamas led the devastating Oct. 7 attacks.

Israel began a ground invasion of Lebanon almost three weeks ago.

The Israeli military campaign against Hezbollah has killed more than 2,400 people in Lebanon since last year, most of them in its recently intensified operations, including a ground invasion that began less than three weeks ago. In that time, Israel has flattened several other villages.

It was unclear whether there were any injuries or deaths in Mhaibib; many southern Lebanese border villages were already largely emptied of residents when hostilities flared last year. The village chief, Qassem Ahmed Jaber, was quoted by Anadolu, Turkey’s state-run news agency, as saying that the residents had already fled. He could not be reached for comment by The Times.

Matthew Miller, a State Department spokesman, said at a news briefing on Wednesday that he had seen the video and that U.S. officials had been in contact with the Israeli government but that he did not have any details.

“We understand that Hezbollah does operate at times from underneath civilian homes, inside civilian homes,” Mr. Miller said. “So Israel does have a right to go after those legitimate targets, but they need to do so in a way that protects civilian infrastructure, protects civilians.”

Riley Mellen, Aric Toler, Ephrat Livni and Sanjana Varghese contributed reporting.

Israel has accused the U.N. peacekeepers of acting as a shield for Hezbollah and demanded that they pull out. But all the countries contributing troops to the force and the U.N. Security Council decided unanimously that the force should remain in all positions, according to Mr. Tenenti.

“I think the role of UNIFIL at the moment is more important than ever,” he said.

Mr. Teneti also said that UNIFIL had found “a trace of a possible use” of white phosphorus close to a peacekeeper position, but lacked capacity to investigate reports of wider use in Israel’s bombardment of southern Lebanon. The material can inflict serious burns and munitions using it are banned by international conventions from use against targets close to civilian population. A UNIFIL commander accused Israel last year of directly hitting a peacekeeping position with white phosphorus munitions.

Peacekeepers have come “under deliberate attack” five times as Israeli forces pursue their assault on Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, Mr. Tenenti said. Among the incidents reported since Oct. 10, an Israeli tank opened fire on a UNIFIL observation tower that Mr. Tenenti said was occupied by Serbian peacekeepers on Wednesday, damaging the tower and destroying two cameras.

In other cases in the past week, two Israeli tanks forced their way into a UNIFIL site, staying for 45 minutes, and two peacekeepers were injured six days ago when an Israeli tank fired at an observation tower at UNIFIL’s headquarters in Naqoura, on Lebanon’s southernmost Mediterranean coast.

Israel has denied targeting the U.N. peacekeepers. Mr. Tenenti insisted otherwise.

“What happened is clear deliberate targeting of peacekeepers because there was no one else around,” he said, adding that no other exchanges of fire were underway at the time.

On a routine operation, a unit of commanders in training encountered a group of militants on the streets of Rafah in southern Gaza. They didn’t know at the time that the group included Mr. Sinwar.

Two militants fled into one building, while a third, who would later turn out to be Mr. Sinwar, entered another, triggering an hourslong firefight, according to the Israeli military.

During the encounter, shrapnel, possibly from either a small missile or tank shell hit Mr. Sinwar on his right arm and wounded him, the director of Israel’s national forensic institute, Dr. Chen Kugel, who oversaw the autopsy and described its findings in an interview with The New York Times on Friday.

At some point, Mr. Sinwar tied an electric cable around his wounded arm, in what appears to be a makeshift tourniquet to stanch the bleeding, Dr. Kugel added. “But it wouldn’t have worked in any case,” he said. “It wasn’t strong enough, and his forearm was smashed.”

An Israeli drone that was flown into the building where Mr. Sinwar had fled captured what the Israeli military said were the “moments before his elimination.”

The video, edited and released by the military, shows a man sitting in a chair, covered in dust. The man, identified as Mr. Sinwar by the military, watches the drone for at least 20 seconds before throwing what appears to be a stick in its direction.

The Times could not independently verify the identity of the man. Elements of the video match those of other photographs obtained by The Times showing the corpse of Mr. Sinwar.

Mr. Sinwar was later shot in the head, killing him, Dr. Kugel said. Other points remain unclear, including when the fatal shot was fired, what weapon was used and who fired it.

The following morning, his body was found in the rubble of the building, which had partially collapsed following shelling, according to Israeli officials. Soldiers at the site realized the militant bore a striking resemblance to Mr. Sinwar.

The soldiers cut off one of his fingers so that health officials could establish his identity, Dr. Kugel said. The body arrived at the national forensic institute on Thursday night for the autopsy.

The institute director said that Mr. Sinwar was relatively pale, which would make sense for someone who had spent long stretches of time in Hamas’s underground tunnel network, as is believed. He was at a healthy weight — over 150 pounds — and showed no signs of malnutrition, Dr. Kugel added.

For Dr. Kugel, the autopsy was the closing of a painful circle that began during last year’s Hamas attack on southern Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed. In its wake, an endless tide of victims flooded into Israel’s forensic institute.

Now Mr. Sinwar, the architect of the attack, lay on his table.

Dr. Kugel performed his work as he had done many times before. “It was only when I stepped outside that I internalized that this was the man responsible for more murder than anyone in the history of the country,” he said.

After the autopsy was complete, the body was handed over to the Israeli military, Dr. Kugel said. Israel holds the corpses of hundreds of Palestinians that it hopes to one day use for a future exchange with Hamas and other armed groups.

Aric Toler, Riley Mellen and Christiaan Triebert contributed reporting.

After a former colleague shared a photograph that later circulated online and that appeared to show the body of a man with facial features strongly resembling Mr. Sinwar, Dr. Bitton said he realized that it was the man he had spent years talking to, treating and analyzing.

“I spent so many years looking at his face that I didn’t need any form of identification,” he said. “I immediately recognized him.”

Since the two got to know each other in an Israeli prison in the early 2000s, their lives have been closely intertwined. Now that the Hamas leader is dead, Dr. Bitton expressed hope that a more peaceful future would descend on the Middle East — and that he would finally lose the moniker of the Israeli who saved Mr. Sinwar.

In 2004, Dr. Bitton, then a young prison dentist, came across a befuddled Mr. Sinwar in the infirmary. After a short exchange, Dr. Bitton realized that Mr. Sinwar’s life was at risk and that he needed to be taken to a hospital immediately.

At the hospital, surgeons removed an aggressive brain tumor, and Mr. Sinwar thanked Dr. Bitton for saving his life.

The two developed a unique relationship of sorts. As a dentist and later as a senior intelligence officer for the Israeli prison service, Dr. Bitton spent hours talking to Mr. Sinwar, up until the moment that Mr. Sinwar boarded a bus back to Gaza during a prisoner exchange in 2011.

“The conversations with Sinwar were not personal or emotional,” Dr. Bitton said. “They were only about Hamas.”

But the Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023, which prompted Israel to go to war in Gaza, did affect him personally: Dr. Bitton’s nephew Tamir Adar was taken hostage during the assault, he said. The Israeli government later told the family that intelligence suggested that Mr. Adar was injured in the attacks and had apparently died not long after being taken to Gaza.

Dr. Bitton did not take joy in the Hamas leader’s death. “In the Torah there’s a proverb, ‘Don’t rejoice when your enemy falls,’” he said.

But he did express optimism that the killing of Mr. Sinwar would help precipitate a deal to bring home the remaining hostages in Gaza and end the war there. “This is what is known as a game changer,” he said.

Dr. Bitton also said he hoped that Mr. Sinwar’s death would end a chapter in his own life. “I’m asked every day if I have regrets,” Dr. Bitton said, referring to his role in saving Mr. Sinwar’s life. “I couldn’t have acted any differently,” he added.

“Now, I think that both the public and the media will no longer have this association that he’s alive because of me,” Dr. Bitton said. “That’s it. He’s no longer alive.”

Mr. Sinwar, the leader of Hamas and the top target of Israel’s military, was killed in a firefight with Israeli soldiers in the southern Gaza Strip on Wednesday, Israeli officials said. He rose through Hamas’s ranks after it seized power in Gaza in 2007 and helped it to establish authoritarian rule.

And he was a key architect of Hamas’s attack on Israel last October, which left up to 1,200 dead and set off Israel’s yearlong air campaign and ground invasion of Gaza that has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, and destroyed the territory’s infrastructure.

Ms. Abu Hammad has lost one brother since the war began, she said. Another had his legs amputated because of injuries suffered in Israeli attacks, and she had been injured, too, she said.

“I hope his death will put an end to this war soon,” Ms. Abu Hammad said of the Hamas leader. “Sinwar is the one who planned all of this, and now it is a normal outcome that he be killed.”

At a makeshift roadside coffee shop near where Ms. Abu Hammad was shopping, several people shared her hopes.

Before the war, Khaled Abu Jarad, 59, worked as a taxi driver in Gaza City. He now lives in a makeshift camp outside a gas station in Khan Younis, displaced from his home like most of Gaza’s 2.2 million people. He said he thought only dyed-in-the-wool Hamas supporters would mourn Mr. Sinwar, whose brutality to his fellow Palestinians suspected of spying for Israel earned him the nickname “the butcher of Khan Younis.”

Mr. Abu Jarad expressed hope that the death of Mr. Sinwar — who was widely seen as an obstacle in cease-fire talks — would lead to a compromise between Israel and Hamas that could end the fighting and allow people to return to their homes. “It would be insane and bizarre to keep killing all of Gaza in this war,” he said.

Saher Abdul Ghafour, 19, agreed, saying that the war must end “at any cost.”

“I hope the next leader of Hamas can be a more diplomatic and wise person who can stop this war through negotiations and political channels,” he said.

Others in the coffee shop were less optimistic.

Ahmed Awad, 21, whose university studies in design were interrupted by the war, said he had “lost hope” that it would end. But he, too, said he felt “a kind of relief” when he heard Mr. Sinwar had been killed.

“Sinwar’s death may make some supporters of his sad and angry, but the majority of other people won’t feel that way because they lost everything,” Mr. Awad said. “He is gone now, and we will see what he has left behind.”