When we entered the tunnel, we found it almost entirely intact. The crammed room where Sinwar and four fellow militants were said to have died was stained with blood, but its walls appeared undamaged. The mattresses, clothes and bedsheets did not appear to have been dislodged by the explosions, and an Israeli rifle – stolen earlier in the war, the soldiers said – dangled from a hook in the corner. It was not immediately clear how Sinwar was killed, and Defrin said he could not provide a definitive answer. He suggested that Sinwar and his allies may have suffocated in the aftermath of the strikes or been knocked over by a shock wave unleashed by explosions. If gases released by such explosions intentionally poisoned Sinwar, it would raise legal questions, said international law experts. “It would be an unlawful use of a conventional bomb – a generally lawful weapon – if the intent is to kill with the asphyxiating gases released by that bomb,” said Sarah Harrison, a former lawyer at the US Defence Department and an analyst at the International Crisis Group. Defrin denied any such intent. “This is something that I have to emphasise here, as a Jew first and then as a human being: We don’t use gas as weapons,” he said. In other tunnels discovered by the Israeli military, soldiers have used Palestinians as human shields, sending them on ahead to check for traps. Defrin denied the practice. The tunnel was excavated by Israelis, he said. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.