Dubai: Nearly six years ago, Yahya Sinwar, who’s just been named Hamas’s political leader, scrawled a note on a document that he knew Egyptian intermediaries would hand to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Take a “’calculated risk’ on a ceasefire,” Sinwar wrote in Hebrew, according to former National Security Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat.
Not long before, the then new Hamas chief for Gaza had said something similar to an Italian journalist: “I don’t want war anymore. I want a ceasefire.”
His ambition for the impoverished Palestinian coastal strip? “We can be like Singapore.”
For the past 10 months, since Hamas’ long-planned and bloody October 7 assault, the Israeli security establishment and others have looked back on his words as part of an effort to create the illusion that Hamas, considered a terrorist group by the US and European Union, was limiting its embrace of violence to focus on governance.
“Sinwar’s election effectively marks the subordination of Hamas’s political wing in its entirety to Sinwar,” Arab affairs commentator Avi Issacharoff wrote in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper on Wednesday.
Betty Lahat, the prison system’s intelligence chief at the time, said in a TV documentary that she tried to use that event to recruit him as an agent.
“I said, the state of Israel saved your life,” she said. “I thought I could turn him into one of ours, but he wasn’t interested. He kept talking about the day he would be released. I told him you’re never getting out. He said there’s a date: God knows it.”
There was a date. It was Oct. 18, 2011, when Israel exchanged more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for an Israeli soldier held by Hamas, Gilad Shalit. Among those released “- and the man who drew up the list “- was Sinwar.
Because he’d killed fellow Palestinians and not Israelis, and was no longer young, some Israeli officials didn’t object to his being on the list. Others did.
“There was talk of how he was not a threat,” Michael Milshtein, former head of Palestinian research in military intelligence, recalled last year. “He doesn’t want to return to dangerous activity, he’s forgotten how to plan a terror attack. I tried to tell them they were wrong. Hamas is a mission for your whole life. It took him only a week to return to his connections and activities. Today, Hamas in Gaza is Sinwar.”
'Like a little Hitler in a bunker'
Israeli officials say Sinwar created a sense of complacency around Hamas. The military reduced its surveillance of the Gaza border fence, relying on electronic sensors and transferring troops to guard settlements in the West Bank. Today, with much of Gaza reduced to rubble as Israel seeks to destroy Hamas, with some 40,000 people killed in the process, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, Sinwar is viewed not only as one of the assault’s masterminds but as the very symbol of Palestinian armed struggle. He’s the top target for assassination, assumed to be hiding deep in a Gaza tunnel.
What effect Sinwar’s selection will have on ceasefire negotiations is unclear. He replaces Ismail Haniyeh as political chief following Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran last week. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied being responsible. Israeli officials have said that Sinwar was running the negotiations behind the scenes all along. Others say he did at first but he’s now unable to communicate and was given the political title as an act of symbolism, to tell Israel and the world that he is the essence of the movement.
The October 7 attack, in which Hamas killed 1,200 and abducted 250, and the subsequent war in Gaza are remaking regional — even global — politics, raising a risk of broader war. This is especially true in the wake of the recent assassinations of Haniyeh and a Hezbollah leader in Beirut. Israel is bracing for an Iranian response.
Still, it’s notable that the dynamic that gave rise to the current situation is one of intimate enemies. Sinwar and the Israelis have been watching and analyzing one another for decades.
EDUCATION: A graduate of the Islamic University in Gaza, he learned perfect Hebrew during his 23 years in Israeli jails and is said to have a deep understanding of Israeli culture and society.
EARLY INVOLVEMENT: Co-founded the Ezzedine Al Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing. Sinwar became a senior commander in the Qassam Brigades, before taking overall leadership of the movement in Gaza.
Sinwar joined Hamas as one of its leaders almost as soon as the group was founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 1987.
The following year, he was arrested by Israeli forces and handed four life sentences – the equivalent of 426 years in jail – for alleged involvement in the capture and killing of two Israeli soldiers and four suspected Palestinian spies.
After his release, Sinwar quickly rose through Hamas’s ranks again. In 2012, he was elected to the group’s political bureau and was tasked with coordinating with the Qassam Brigades.
HAMAS ROLE: Joined shortly after its founding in 1987; became senior commander in Qassam Brigades; led Hamas in Gaza from 2017.
IMPRISONMENT: Arrested in 1988, received four life sentences for alleged involvement in the deaths of two Israeli soldiers and four suspected spies.
POST-RELEASE: Rapidly rose through Hamas ranks; elected to Hamas’s political bureau in 2012.
NOTABLE ACTIONS: Played a key role during the 2014 Gaza conflict; labeled a “specially designated global terrorist” by the US in 2015.
RECENT EVENTS: Accused of masterminding the October 7, 2023 attacks, resulting in significant casualties and hostages; described by Israeli military as a “dead man walking”.
ATTITUDE: Sinwar is often portrayed as one of the most uncompromising top Hamas officials.
IDEOLOGY: Advocates for a single Palestinian state encompassing Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem; pragmatic yet radical in military strategy and political negotiations.
WHAT DO OTHERS THINK OF HIM?: The ascetic 62-year-old is a security operator “par excellence”, according to Abu Abdallah, a Hamas member who spent years alongside him in Israeli jails.
“He makes decisions in the utmost calm, but is intractable when it comes to defending the interests of Hamas,” Abu Abdallah told AFP in 2017, after his former co-detainee was elected Hamas’s leader in Gaza.
After October 7, Israeli military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht called Sinwar the “face of evil” and declared him a “dead man walking”.
Sinwar dreams of a single Palestinian state bringing together the Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank - controlled by Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party - and annexed east Jerusalem.
According to US think-tank the Council on Foreign Relations, he has vowed to punish anyone obstructing reconciliation with Fatah, the rival political movement with which Hamas engaged in factional fighting after elections in 2006.
Sinwar has pursued a path of being “radical in military planning and pragmatic in politics”, according to Leila Seurat of the Arab Centre for Research and Political Studies (CAREP) in Paris.
“He doesn’t advocate force for force’s sake, but to bring about negotiations” with Israel, she said.
Cold-blooded, magnetic leader
Sinwar joined Hamas when Sheikh Ahmad Yassin founded the group around the time the first Palestinian intifada began in 1987.
Sinwar set up the group’s internal security apparatus the following year and went on to head an intelligence unit dedicated to flushing out and mercilessly punishing — sometimes killing — Palestinians accused of providing information to Israel.
According to a transcript of an interrogation with security officials published in Israeli media, Sinwar professed to have strangled an alleged collaborator with a keffiyeh scarf in a Khan Yunis cemetery.
While his predecessor, Haniyeh, had encouraged efforts by Hamas to present a moderate face to the world, Sinwar has preferred to force the Palestinian issue to the fore by more violent means.
Israeli officials describe him as a cold-blooded, magnetic leader; a compact, sinewy man whose close-cropped hair and beard have by now mostly turned white.
He rejoined Hamas at a senior level and by 2017 had been elected the group’s leader for all of Gaza, replacing Haniyeh, who was sent to Qatar.
When Israel was fooled
After the October attack, a senior Hamas official, Ali Baraka, told the Russian state channel RT that the group had prepared for October 7 for two years while fooling Israel into thinking it was “busy governing Gaza.” Planning encompassed not only the attack, but also how Hamas would rule in its aftermath.
That was the subject of a 2021 conference in Gaza entitled “The Promise of the End of Days,” where Sinwar delivered the keynote address. A summary document revealed it to have dealt with the topic of what to do with Israeli experts once the country was defeated: “Keep the Jewish scientists and experts in the fields of medicine, engineering, technology, civil and military industry for a while and do not let them leave with their knowledge and experience.”
While Hamas officials never spoke directly to Israeli authorities, Sinwar worked through intermediaries to persuade Israel of his group’s benign intentions. As part of these efforts, he collaborated with the Palestinian Authority to negotiate Israeli work permits for some 18,000 Gazans, allowing them to work as day laborers within Israel.
It was some of these workers who Israeli security officials say drew maps of the communities and made lists of local families to orient the Hamas militants before Oct. 7.
Several released Israeli hostages say that when they were first taken to Gaza, Sinwar came to see them, speaking to them in Hebrew. Israeli military officials say they’ve come close to capturing or killing him a couple of times in the war. So far, he has escaped.
Some 70 kilometers (40 miles) north of Gaza, a poster hangs on the wall of the office of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in Tel Aviv. It features dozens of Hamas commanders with lines drawn across the faces of those killed by Israel. The poster has been filling with marks.
