After more than a year of war in the Gaza Strip, it is a great success for the Israeli security forces: In the search for the masterminds of the brutal attack by the Islamist Hamas on Israel on October 7, 2023, the Israeli army has now also tracked down Hamas boss Yahya Sinwar. “The mass murderer Yahya Sinwar” was killed by Israeli soldiers, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said on Thursday evening.
For many Israelis, Sinwar was “the face of the devil.” After the death of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, Sinwar was appointed the new “head of the political bureau” of the radical Islamic Palestinian organization in August. Sinwar is considered the key mastermind of the Hamas attack on Israel that left more than 1,200 dead. However, Sinwar had been on the US terror list since 2015. However, all previous attempts to track down and eliminate the 61-year-old had failed.
Short gray hair, full beard, slim build. This is how Sinwar appeared in public. He had not appeared in public since October 2023. It was suspected that he, like Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif, another mastermind of the October 7 massacre, was hiding in the extensive tunnel system under the Gaza Strip. Deif was killed in an airstrike in the Gaza Strip in mid-July; Hamas did not confirm Deif’s death.
Hundreds of Hamas fighters invaded southern Israel at dawn on October 7th. They murdered more than a thousand people with a cruelty that did not even spare babies. 251 people, including many women and children, were also kidnapped as hostages in the Gaza Strip.
“Raid prepared for one to two years”
Leïla Seurat of the Arab research center Carep in Paris said of Sinwar’s role in the attack: “That was his strategy, he planned the operation.” He probably spent one or two years preparing the attack.
Sinwar’s career with Hamas was hidden for decades. When the first Intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation, began in 1987 in a refugee camp in the north of the Gaza Strip, Sinwar joined the newly founded Hamas, which denies Israel’s right to exist and has declared Israel’s destruction as its goal. He himself also comes from a refugee camp: Khan Younis in the south. He later studied at the Islamic University in the city of Gaza.
At 25, Sinwar was already heading the Hamas unit that punished Palestinians who worked with the Israelis. He was sentenced to life imprisonment four times for the killing of two Israeli soldiers. In total, Sinwar was imprisoned in Israel for 23 years. There he learned Hebrew and established himself as a leader of the prisoners. Sinwar was released in 2011 as one of around 1,000 Palestinian prisoners who were exchanged for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been taken hostage by Hamas.
Sinwar succeeded Haniyeh
Six years later, in 2017, Hamas elected him as its political leader in the Gaza Strip after his predecessor Ismail Haniyeh became head of the organization and moved his residence to Qatar. At that time, Hamas spoke out in favor of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, but its long-term goal remained the “liberation” of all of Palestine – i.e. the destruction of Israel.
Former prisoner Abu Abdallah described Sinwar as charismatic and making “decisions in complete calm.” Researcher Seurat calls Sinwar’s strategy at the head of Hamas “militarily radical and politically pragmatic.” “He doesn’t advocate violence for the sake of violence, but to force the Israelis to negotiate.”
Sinwar apparently reported his own brutality during interrogations in Israel. In an excerpt published by Israeli media, he described how he kidnapped an alleged traitor: “We took him to the cemetery of Khan Younis (…), I put him in a grave and strangled him with a cloth (…). I was sure he knew he deserved to die.”
Decisive blow against Hamas
Politically, Sinwar wanted to achieve unified leadership in all Palestinian areas, including the occupied West Bank, which is ruled by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s secular Fatah party, which rivals Hamas. After the agreement between Hamas and Israel to exchange hostages for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons in November 2023, brokered by the United States, Qatar and Egypt, Sinwar’s popularity also increased enormously in the West Bank.
More than a year after the worst attack on Israel since its founding, Sinwar’s death is a decisive blow against the already weakened Hamas.
