After a profession within the shadows, spent in Israeli prisons and the interior safety equipment of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar emerged because the chief of the Palestinian group after serving to ignite a full-blown battle that has engulfed the area.
Sinwar is among the many Hamas leaders accused of masterminding the group’s assault on Israel on October 7 final yr, and is alleged to have been hiding in a community of tunnels the militants constructed beneath Gaza.
On Thursday, Israel mentioned it was checking whether or not it had killed 61-year-old Sinwar in a Gaza operation, in what would represent a large blow to the group.
Sinwar was the top of Hamas in Gaza through the October 7 assault, however rose to change into the group’s general chief in August after the killing of political chief Ismail Haniyeh.
The killing of Haniyeh in Tehran on July 31 has been broadly blamed on Israel, which has by no means claimed the assassination.
Additionally in July, Israel mentioned it killed Hamas army chief Mohammed Deif, however the group by no means confirmed his dying.
“Each Hamas member is a lifeless man,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu mentioned final yr after the October 7 assault sparked the Gaza battle.
– Punishing collaborators –
The Hamas assault resulted within the deaths of 1,206 individuals in Israel, in accordance with an AFP tally based mostly on Israeli official figures that embody hostages killed in captivity.
Israel’s retaliatory marketing campaign in Gaza has killed 42,438 individuals, the bulk civilians, in accordance with knowledge from the well being ministry within the Hamas-run territory.
The October 7 assault most likely a yr or two within the planning, “took everybody without warning” and “modified the stability of energy on the bottom”, mentioned Leila Seurat of the Arab Centre for Analysis and Political Research in Paris.
Sinwar is a safety operator “par excellence”, in accordance with Abu Abdallah, a Hamas member who spent years alongside him in Israeli jails.
“He makes choices within the utmost calm, however is intractable in relation to defending the pursuits of Hamas,” Abu Abdallah advised AFP in 2017, after his former co-detainee was elected Hamas’s chief in Gaza.
Born within the Khan Yunis refugee camp in southern Gaza, Sinwar joined Hamas when Sheikh Ahmad Yassin based the group across the time the primary Palestinian intifada started in 1987.
Sinwar arrange the group’s inside safety equipment the next yr and went on to move an intelligence unit devoted to flushing out and mercilessly punishing — generally killing — Palestinians accused of offering info to Israel.
Based on a transcript of an interrogation with safety officers revealed in Israeli media, Sinwar professed to have strangled an alleged collaborator with a keffiyeh scarf in a Khan Yunis cemetery.
A graduate of the Islamic College in Gaza, he discovered good Hebrew throughout his 23 years in Israeli jails and is alleged to have a deep understanding of Israeli tradition and society.
– ‘Radical and pragmatic’ –
He was serving 4 life phrases for the killing of two Israeli troopers when he turned probably the most senior of 1,027 Palestinians launched in alternate for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011.
Sinwar later turned a senior commander within the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the army wing of Hamas, earlier than taking general management of the motion in Gaza.
Whereas his predecessor, Haniyeh, had inspired efforts by Hamas to current a reasonable face to the world, Sinwar has most popular to power the Palestinian difficulty to the fore by extra violent means.
Sinwar is alleged to have strived for a single Palestinian state bringing collectively the Gaza Strip, the occupied West Financial institution — managed by Mahmud Abbas’s Fatah celebration — and annexed east Jerusalem.
Based on US think-tank the Council on Overseas Relations, he has vowed to punish anybody obstructing reconciliation with Fatah, the rival political motion with which Hamas engaged in factional preventing after elections in 2006.
That coming collectively stays elusive, however the prisoner releases ensuing from the transient November truce settlement with Israel noticed Hamas’s recognition soar within the West Financial institution.
Sinwar has pursued a path of being “radical in army planning and pragmatic in politics”, in accordance with Seurat.
“He does not advocate power for power’s sake, however to result in negotiations” with Israel, she mentioned.
The Hamas chief was added to the US listing of probably the most needed “worldwide terrorists” in 2015.
Vowing in November to “discover and remove” Sinwar, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant urged Gazans to show Sinwar in, including “should you attain him earlier than us, it’s going to shorten the battle”.
