Israel’s public enemy number one
How Yahya Sinwar became October 7 ‘mastermind’
By James Callery
Reporter
The mastermind of the Hamas attack on Israel that triggered the worst Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed in generations is a secretive leader, feared on both sides of the battle lines.
In Gaza, no figure looms larger in determining the future trajectory of the war than Yahya Sinwar.
The wiry, grey-haired 61-year-old is believed to have engineered the surprise October 7, 2023, attack into southern Israel, along with the shadowy Mohammed Deif, the head of Hamas’s armed wing.
The attack caught Israel’s military and intelligence establishment off guard and shattered the image of Israeli invincibility, as Hamas fighters killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and captured around 240 captives.
In December, Israeli forces had surrounded Sinwar’s house, Benjamin Netanyahu said. “It’s only a matter of time before we get him,” he said.
The IDF said he is hiding underground. Obsessive and disciplined, Sinwar is Hamas’s top leader inside the Palestinian territory, a rarely seen veteran who learned fluent Hebrew during years in Israeli prisons and carefully studied his enemy.
Israeli officials have vowed to kill him and crush the resistance group that was founded in 1987 and has ruled Gaza since 2007.
But as the war rages into its fourth month, Sinwar remains alive, in hiding and at the helm of Hamas’s gunmen as they battle Israeli forces.
He also controls the group’s negotiations over the fate of the remaining captives captured during the October 7 attack.
‘Intractable’ in defending Hamas interests
In March 2021, Sinwar was re-elected as the head of Hamas’s political wing in Gaza, extending his tenure as the Islamist movement’s de facto leader in the Israeli-blockaded Palestinian enclave. He succeeded politician Ismail Haniyeh.
Haniyeh, who was based in Qatar, congratulated Sinwar and said the election marked “a victory” for the Islamist group.
After a career in the shadows, spent in Israeli prisons, and the internal security apparatus of Hamas, Sinwar rose to lead the Islamist movement in the Gaza Strip.
The October 7 attacks, probably a year or two in the planning, “took everyone by surprise” and “changed the balance of power on the ground”, said Leila Seurat of the Arab Centre for Research and Political Studies (CAREP) in Paris.
The ascetic mastermind has not been seen since October 7.
Known for his secrecy, Sinwar is an excellent security operator, according to Abu Abdallah, a Hamas member who spent years alongside him in Israeli jails.
“He makes decisions in the utmost calm, but is intractable when it comes to defending the interests of Hamas,” Abdallah said in 2017 after his former co-detainee was elected Hamas’s leader in Gaza.
Respected by Palestinians
Security sources outside Gaza say that both Sinwar and Deif have taken refuge in the network of tunnels built under the territory to withstand Israeli bombs.
If he can win the release of all Palestinian prisoners and the lifting of the 16-year blockade of Gaza, people will feel they have obtained something, said Hani al-Masri, a veteran Palestinian analyst.
A former commander of Hamas’s military wing, when Sinwar became its leader in Gaza in 2017, it represented for some the hardest line within the Islamist movement, which has fought three wars against Israel since 2008.
Hamas said it launched the October 7 attack in retaliation for increasing Israeli depredations against Palestinians and the continuing occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza —and to push the Palestinian cause back onto the world agenda.
Among fellow Palestinians, some respect Sinwar for standing up to Israel and for remaining in impoverished Gaza, in contrast to other Hamas leaders living more comfortably abroad.
In a show of defiance two years ago, Sinwar ended one of his few public speeches by inviting Israel to assassinate him, proclaiming: “I will walk back home after this meeting.” He then did so, shaking hands and taking selfies with people in the streets.
Early taste of displacement
Sinwar was born in Gaza’s Khan Younis refugee camp in 1962.
Israel’s 1948 war forced his family out of the Palestinian town of Madjal.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced in a period known as the Nakba, which means ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic.
After Madjal’s Palestinian population had left — with the remaining residents deported in 1950 — Israel renamed the city Ashkelon, where Sinwar would later spend time in prison.
Sinwar spoke of the lack of sanitation and the poverty of living on UN handouts, said Mansour.
“He’d always go back to these stories when he’d tell us to struggle against the occupation,” Mansour said.
Stalwart in prison
Sinwar was first arrested by Israel in 1982 when he was a student at the Islamic University in Gaza, where he was a founding member of Hamas’s student movement, said Ibrahim al-Madhoun, a Hamas-affiliated columnist.
Mansour said he would stand by his decisions “even if they are harsh”.
Sinwar was active during the first intifada against Israel, which started in Gaza in 1987.
He formed a close bond with Hamas’s founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. They prayed together at the same Gaza City mosque.
Sinwar was detained again in 1988 when an improvised explosive device he was making detonated, said Michael Koubi.
Koubi noted that on the first day, he appeared very strong and did not want to speak.
Sinwar quickly rose through the Hamas ranks after his release from jail in 2011, along with 1,026 other Palestinians in exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in a cross-border raid.
But it was in prison that he managed to further this influence.
“He didn’t come from nowhere,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a professor in politics at Gaza’s al-Azhar University.
As a young man, Sinwar led the Majd, Hamas’s internal security force.
He is now the man Israel wants to kill most.
Sinwar is thought to be sheltered beneath Gaza’s intricate underground tunnel network as Israeli soldiers search the enclave and shower it with missiles.
The precision behind the October 7 attack was decades in the making.
His former prison mate Esmat Mansour recalled that Sinwar said his family lived in tragic circumstances and that he would never be able to shake off those memories.
Initially, he carried little gravitas in the Israeli penal system, where prisoners are split into various Palestinian factions.
But while incarcerated, he continued to search for collaborators with Israel, Mansour and Koubi said.
As Hamas’s clout within the Palestinian political scene strengthened, Sinwar began his journey to power.
He was elected Hamas’s leader in the prison around the time of the second intifada, where he organised strikes for better conditions.
“Being a leader inside prison gave him experience in negotiations and dialogue, and he understood the mentality of the enemy and how to affect it,” said Anwar Yassine, a Lebanese citizen who spent about 17 years in Israeli jails, much of the time with Sinwar.
In June 2006, Sinwar’s younger brother, Muhammad, was thought to have played a significant role in the cross-border raid that led to Shalit’s capture.
“When Hamas got stronger and they kidnapped Shalit, he became the one-man show,” Mansour said.
Mansour said he lost interest in meeting with prison authorities and instead received attention from Israeli intelligence and other officials asking for Shalit’s release.
Sinwar addressed cheering crowds in Gaza City upon his release, urging Hamas to free those remaining in Israeli prisons.
“This must turn immediately into a practical plan,” he said.
‘I don’t want any more wars’
After his release from jail, Sinwar initially made a number of public appearances. Later, however, he disappeared from public view and was presented in Hamas media as the commander of Qassam’s elite units.
According to those who know him, he still holds a deep interest in the plight of Palestinian prisoners, which likely spurred the drive for the capturing of Israeli captives on October 7.
Washington accuses Sinwar of pushing for kidnapping more Israeli soldiers as a bargaining chip for Palestinian prisoners.
In public interviews before the October 7 assault — including one with an Israeli newspaper in 2018 — he said he was not looking for confrontation.
“I don’t want any more wars,” he told Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.
In joining the political wing of Hamas, Sinwar effectively knocked down the divide between the group’s officials and fighters, said Israeli journalist Shlomi Eldar, who wrote a 2012 book on Hamas and interviewed some of its most senior officials.
Eldar said that he was a pioneering figure in the movement.
Other group leaders would have been too fearful of the repercussions to have staged an attack of the magnitude of the October 7 onslaught, he said.
In taking the risk, others suspect he was attempting to position himself as the leader of the Palestinian cause, a long-sought role.
“No one can deny that he recorded his name in history, on the one hand, and changed the static situation that Israel adopted to deal with the Palestinians,” one Palestinian official who met Sinwar numerous times said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
As the search for the mastermind ramps up, he is likely accompanied by close confidants, including his brother Muhammad. Muhammad faked his death in 2014 but was shown in a video issued on December 17 being escorted in a car through the four-kilometre long and 50-meter deep “strategic” level tunnel it had revealed earlier that day.
Koubi said that the leader will battle until the end.
Seeking unity with West Bank
Sinwar has come to endorse the idea of a single Palestinian administration, bringing together the Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank — controlled by Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party — and annexed east Al-Quds (Jerusalem).
The same year he was elected, Hamas for the first time accepted in principle a Palestinian state in the pre-1967 borders, while not recognising Israel and retaining the ultimate goal of “liberating” all of historic Palestine.
According to the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank, Sinwar has vowed to punish anyone obstructing reconciliation with Fatah.
That coming together remains elusive, but the prisoner releases resulting from the truce agreement with Israel in November saw Hamas’s popularity soar in the West Bank.
Sinwar has pursued a path of being “radical in military planning and pragmatic in politics”, according to Seurat.
“He doesn’t advocate force for force’s sake, but to bring about negotiations” with Israel, she said.
In 2008, Sinwar survived an aggressive form of brain cancer after treatment at a Tel Aviv hospital.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released him in 2011 along with more than 1,000 other prisoners in exchange for kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
Netanyahu was harshly criticised for releasing dozens of prisoners held for their involvement in deadly attacks.
Back in Gaza, Sinwar closely coordinated between Hamas’s political leadership and its military wing, the Qassam Brigades.
In 2017, he was elected head of Hamas’s political bureau in Gaza.
Sinwar worked with Hamas’s leader in exile, Ismail Haniyeh, to realign the group with Iran and its allies, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah. He also focused on building Hamas’s military power.
For Hamas, surviving the war in any form would defy Israel and offer a victory of sorts. Sinwar himself may not survive.
The full article first appeared in MailOnline.