Yahya Sinwar.
Credit: Reuters photo
Yahya Sinwar, the Palestinian militant leader who emerged from two decades of prison in Israel to rise to the helm of Hamas and help plot the deadliest assault on Israel in its history, died Wednesday. He was in his early 60s.
His death was announced by the Israeli military Thursday, which said he had been killed by a unit of trainee squad commanders who encountered him while on an operation in the southern Gaza Strip.
A longtime Hamas leader who assumed its top political office in August, Sinwar was known among supporters and enemies alike for combining cunning and brutality. He built Hamas’ ability to harm Israel in service of the group’s long-term goal of destroying the Jewish state and building an Islamist, Palestinian nation in its place.
He played a central role in planning the surprise assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed about 1,200 people, brought 250 others back to the Gaza Strip as hostages and put him at the top of Israel’s kill list.
The assault raised Hamas’ standing in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and elsewhere in the Arab world, according to polls, but not among Palestinians in Gaza, whose lives and homes bore the brunt of Israel’s subsequent invasion.
Sinwar’s life was profoundly shaped by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
He was born in 1962 in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, a crowded, impoverished territory bordering Israel and Egypt.
Information about his parents was not immediately available, but like most Gaza inhabitants, his family members were registered Palestinian refugees. They or their ancestors had fled or been chased from their homes in the war surrounding Israel’s creation in 1948.
In 1988, Israel prosecuted Sinwar in the killing of four Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel. He spent more than two decades in Israeli prisons, an experience that he later said allowed him to study his enemy.
“They wanted the prison to be a grave for us — a mill to grind our will, determination and bodies,” he said in 2011. “But, thank God, with our belief in our cause, we turned prison into sanctuaries of worship and academies for study.”
In 2011, Israel and Hamas agreed to exchange one captured Israeli soldier, Gilad Schalit, for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. Sinwar was the most senior prisoner freed in the deal.
Sinwar climbed the ranks inside Hamas. In 2012, he became the representative of Hamas’ armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, a role akin to defense minister.
In 2017, Sinwar became the leader of Hamas in Gaza, taking over from Ismail Haniyeh, who moved to Qatar and served as the group’s top political leader until Israel assassinated him in Tehran, Iran.
His violent rhetoric against Israel never softened. But Sinwar also continued to seek accommodations with Israel, negotiating to allow the entry of about $30 million in monthly aid to Gaza from Qatar and an increase in the number of permits for Gaza residents to work in Israel.
Such moves, in addition to Sinwar’s decision to keep Hamas out of clashes between Israel and other armed groups, led to a belief in the Israeli security establishment that tight security measures and limited improvements in Gaza residents’ quality of life could keep Hamas contained.
But that hope was dashed Oct. 7, 2023, when fighters disabled Israel’s border defenses; stormed into Israel by sea, air and land; and rampaged through Israeli communities and military bases, shooting soldiers and civilians and showing how wrong Israel’s assessments of Sinwar were.