Yahya Sinwar: ruthless actor who planned Hamas’ October 7 attack | Hamas

Just days after the attacks on October 7 last year, Israeli investigators identified Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ then military leader in Gaza, as the mastermind. To their increasing astonishment, they learned that Sinwar had not only planned what he called “Operation al-Aqsa Flood,” but had planned and organized the attack almost alone.

Only a handful of close associates had been privy to the plans, some with just days left before the attack, which killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, kidnapped 250 and triggered an Israeli offensive that has so far claimed 42,500 lives People, mostly civilians, left large parts of the Gaza Strip in ruins.

Sinwar was born in a refugee camp in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip to parents who were forced to leave their home in what would become Israel in 1948. As a teenager, Sinwar was drawn into Islamist activism. A religious resurgence was gaining momentum throughout the Middle East. While studying science at the Islamic University of Gaza in the early 1980s, Sinwar was drawn to Ahmed Yassin, a charismatic cleric who founded a local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In 1987, Yassin recruited Sinwar into the newly formed Hamas group and appointed him head of the emerging intelligence agency. His duties included uncovering and punishing spies or other “collaborators” of Israel, as well as people in Gaza who had violated Hamas’s strict “moral codes.” Sinwar did so with unrelenting determination and later confessed to several murders of Palestinians.

He was arrested in 1988 and sentenced to four life sentences for attempted murder and sabotage. He spent 22 years in Israeli prisons. According to a former Israeli interrogator who worked at the institution where Sinwar was held, while in prison, Sinwar refused to speak to guards and personally punished inmates who did so by turning one of them into a makeshift mask Oven pressed. “He is 1,000% dedicated and 1,000% violent, a very, very tough man,” the former interrogator said.

Sinwar was a cultured politician with a sharp mind who decided to use his time in prison to study his enemy. He learned Hebrew and read local newspapers and books. Sinwar organized multiple prison strikes to improve working conditions and survived a brain tumor in 2008 after being treated by Israeli doctors. He wrote a semi-autobiographical novel describing life and militancy in Gaza.

Although he was among more than 1,000 prisoners to be exchanged in 2011 for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas five years earlier, Sinwar rejected the deal. It continued anyway. When Sinwar returned to Gaza, he married, had children and immediately returned to the militant front. A journalist who met him at the time told the Guardian that the Hamas leader was so focused as if “the world outside his eyeballs didn’t exist.”

Four years earlier, Hamas had seized power in Gaza and Sinwar quickly began building a personal following. He crushed an attempt by independent jihadists to establish a beachhead in the area and is widely believed to have been behind the killing of another senior Hamas commander, Mahmoud Ishtewi, after a power struggle in 2016.

With his reputation for ruthless competence, Sinwar took over Hamas’s high command in Gaza in 2018, cementing ties between the organization’s military and civilian administrative wings and increasingly marginalizing its political leadership abroad.

Convinced that the capture of Israeli soldiers was the only way to release prisoners, a task he saw as central to his view of Hamas’ role, Sinwar began planning a major operation to negotiate the basis for the release of Israeli soldiers to get Palestinians out of Israeli prisons.

It is unclear when he conceived the background to the October 7 attacks, but it may be that versions were considered over many years. In 2022, Israel received a Hamas plan for a major attack through the fence, codenamed Jericho Wall. Despite its importance, the plan was kept under wraps because officials believed the group was incapable of such an operation.

Sinwar threw up a smokescreen and lulled Israel into a false sense of security with public statements that could mislead, sometimes even by coming close to the truth. In 2022, Hamas produced a television series called “Fist of the Free” that showed its militants making mass raids on Israel. Sinwar presented awards to everyone involved at a public ceremony, praised the accuracy of the series in a speech and said their work was “an integral part of what we are preparing.”

Analysts are divided over whether Sinwar foresaw the consequences of the Oct. 7 raid and its key targets. It seems clear that he believed Hezbollah would launch a supporting offensive against Israel, which was a mistake, and he may have believed that Israel would not attack Gaza if so many of its citizens were being held hostage. Some experts suspect that Sinwar was happy to sacrifice Gaza and its people for the greater cause.

After the October 7 attack, Sinwar hid and took his family into the network of tunnels that Hamas had built under Gaza. He was appointed Hamas commander in August after Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Tehran in an explosion attributed to Israel. Little had been heard from him since then and nothing had been seen until Thursday.

The exact circumstances of Sinwar’s death remain unclear, but it appears that Israeli troops in the northern Gaza Strip engaged three gunmen in a firefight, then launched an air or artillery strike and found his body in the rubble of a house. Why Sinwar was above ground and armed is also unclear, but he died as he had lived: with a tireless commitment to Hamas and its ideology, as well as violence.