Who was Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader Israel says it killed? – World news

AP Photo/John Minchillo, Archive

FILE – Yahya Sinwar, Palestinian leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, places his hand over his heart on stage after greeting supporters at a rally on May 24, 2021, in Gaza City, Gaza Strip.

Yahya Sinwar planned an attack on Israel that shocked the world, triggering a growing catastrophe with no end in sight.

In Gaza, no figure had greater influence in determining the course of the war than the 61-year-old leader of Hamas. Obsessive, disciplined and dictatorial, he was a rarely seen veteran militant who learned Hebrew over years spent in Israeli prisons and who carefully studied his enemy.

On Thursday, Israel said troops in Gaza killed Sinwar. A senior Hamas political official confirmed the death on Friday.

The secretive figure feared on both sides of the battle lines masterminded the October 7, 2023, surprise attack on southern Israel along with the even more obscure Mohammed Deif, head of Hamas’ armed wing. Israel said it killed Deif in a July airstrike in southern Gaza that killed more than 70 Palestinians.

Shortly afterwards, Hamas leader in exile, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed while visiting Iran in an explosion blamed on Israel. Sinwar was then chosen to take his place as top leader of Hamas, although he was hiding in Gaza.

Palestinian militants who carried out the October 2023 attack killed around 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and kidnapped around 250 others, catching Israel’s military and intelligence system off guard and destroying the image of Israeli invincibility.

Israel’s retaliation was overwhelming. The conflict has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities, who do not distinguish between fighters and civilians. It also caused widespread destruction in Gaza and left hundreds of thousands of people without shelter and many on the brink of starvation.

Sinwar held indirect negotiations with Israel to try to end the war. One of his objectives was to achieve the release of thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, similar to the agreement that freed him more than a decade ago.

He worked to bring Hamas closer to Iran and its other allies across the region. The war he unleashed attracted Hezbollah, eventually leading to another Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and led to Iran and Israel exchanging fire directly for the first time, raising fears of an even wider conflict.

For Israelis, Sinwar was a nightmarish figure. The Israeli army’s main spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, called him a murderer “who proved to the entire world that Hamas is worse than ISIS”, referring to the Islamic State group.

Ever defiant, Sinwar ended one of his few public speeches by calling on Israel to assassinate him, proclaiming in Gaza: “I will walk home after this meeting.” So he did, shaking hands and taking selfies with people on the streets.

Among Palestinians, he was respected for standing up to Israel and remaining in impoverished Gaza, in contrast to other Hamas leaders who lived more comfortably abroad.

But he was also deeply feared for his iron grip on Gaza, where public dissent is repressed.

In contrast to the media-friendly personas cultivated by some of Hamas’s political leaders, Sinwar never sought to build a public image. He was known as the “Butcher of Khan Younis” for his brutal approach to Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel.

Sinwar was born in 1962 in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza, into a family that was among hundreds of thousands of Palestinians expelled from what is now Israel during the 1948 war that surrounded his upbringing.

He was an early member of Hamas, which emerged from the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1987, when the coastal enclave was under Israeli military occupation.

Sinwar convinced the group’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, that to succeed as a resistance organization, Hamas needed to be purged of informants for Israel. They founded a security arm, then known as Majd, led by Sinwar.

Arrested by Israel in the late 1980s, he admitted under interrogation to having killed 12 alleged collaborators. He was eventually sentenced to four life sentences for crimes that included the kidnapping and murder of two Israeli soldiers.

Michael Koubi, the former director of the investigations department of Israel’s Shin Bet security agency who interrogated Sinwar, recalled the confession that caught his attention most: Sinwar said he forced a man to bury his own brother alive because he was suspected of working to Israel.

“His eyes were full of happiness when he told us this story,” Koubi said.

But to other prisoners, Sinwar was charismatic, sociable and astute, open to detainees of all political factions.

He became the leader of hundreds of imprisoned Hamas members. He organized strikes to improve conditions. He learned Hebrew and studied Israeli society. He was known for feeding other inmates by making kunafa, a grated dough treat filled with cheese.

“Being a leader inside prison gave him experience in negotiations and dialogue, and he understood the mentality of the enemy and how to affect them,” said Anwar Yassine, a Lebanese citizen who spent about 17 years in Israeli prisons, much of the time. time with Sinwar.

Yassine noted how Sinwar always treated him with respect, even though he belonged to the Lebanese Communist Party, whose secular principles conflicted with Hamas ideology.

During his years in detention, Sinwar wrote a 240-page novel, “Thistle and the Cloves.” It tells the story of Palestinian society from the 1967 Middle East war to 2000, when the second intifada began.

“This is not my personal story, nor the story of a specific person, although all incidents are true,” Sinwar wrote in the opening of the novel.

In 2008, Sinwar survived an aggressive form of brain cancer after treatment in a Tel Aviv hospital.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu freed him in 2011, along with about 1,000 other prisoners, in exchange for Gilad Schalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in a cross-border raid. Netanyahu has been heavily criticized for releasing dozens of prisoners held in connection with deadly attacks.

Back in Gaza, Sinwar coordinated closely between Hamas’s political leadership and its military wing, the Qassam Brigades. He also cultivated a reputation for cruelty. He is believed to be behind the unprecedented 2016 assassination of another top Hamas commander, Mahmoud Ishtewi, in an internal power struggle.

He also married after his release.

In 2017, he was elected head of Hamas’s political office in Gaza. Sinwar worked with Haniyeh to realign the group with Iran and its allies, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah. He also focused on building Hamas’ military power.