ByJAMES GENN
Updated:

On October 16, 2024, an IDF operation in Rafah, Gaza Strip, located Hamas’s arch-terrorist, Yahya Sinwar, with soldiers opening fire, killing him.

Sinwar took responsibility as the architect of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre, which led to over 1,200 deaths and terrorists taking approximately 250 hostages into the strip.

Sources close to the matter told The Jerusalem Post at the time that the operation was not intended to kill Sinwar, implying that soldiers found him through coincidence.

Other notable births and deaths in Jewish history

David Ben-Gurion, the founding prime minister of Israel, was born on October 16, 1886, in Plonsk, Poland, then part of the Russian empire.

A compatriot of Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, the legendary IDF chief of staff and defense minister, died on October 16, 1981, at the age of 66 in Tel Aviv.

THEN-PRIME MINISTER Golda Meir is accompanied by defense minister Moshe Dayan, as they meet with IDF soldiers on the Golan Heights during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Egypt and Syria launched an attack against Israel on Yom Kippur – during the month of Ramadan.
THEN-PRIME MINISTER Golda Meir is accompanied by defense minister Moshe Dayan, as they meet with IDF soldiers on the Golan Heights during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Egypt and Syria launched an attack against Israel on Yom Kippur – during the month of Ramadan. (credit: REUTERS)

In addition, the Nuremberg Trials, investigating Nazi war crimes following World War II concluded, with 12 senior Nazi figures being sentenced to death. 10 of these were hanged on October 16, 1946.

They were: Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sauckel, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and Julius Streicher.

Another notable event tied with the both the Holocaust and October 16 was the Raid on the Roman Ghetto in 1943. Duing the raid, 1,259 people, mainly members of the Jewish community including numbering 363 men, 689 women, and 207 children, were arrested by the Gestapo. Out of these, the Gestapo identified 1,023 as Jewish per Nazi race laws, and deported them to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Fewer than 20 of these are believed to have survived the Holocaust.

Several other key events occurred on this day in history in the 20th Century.

In 1978, Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was elected pope by the conclave, becoming the first pope born outside of Italy in almost five centuries. Taking the papal name John Paul II, Wojtyla continued the actions of his predecessors in rebuilding relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish community. While Pope Paul VI was the first pope to visit Israel in 1964, this was an unofficial visit, and John Paul II was the first pope to officially visit the Jewish State in an official papal capacity in March 2000.

According to the Disney company’s website, “A distributor in New York, M. J. Winkler, contracted to distribute the Alice Comedies on October 16, 1923, and this date became the start of the Disney company.”

Further, in the height of the Cold War, then-president John F. Kennedy, on October 16, 1962, was informed of photographs taken on October 14 by a U-2 spy plane mission which revealed Soviet nuclear missile sites under construction in Cuba. This led to the 13-day-long Cuban Missile Crisis.

On October 16, 1962, another key event occurred in the Communist world. The People’s Republic of China carried out its first successful nuclear bomb detonation, in the Lop Nur region of northwestern China, officially becoming the fifth nuclear power after US, Soviet Union, Britain, and France respectively.