Architect of the October 7 terrorist attacks and head of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar was assassinated by Israel in an operation in the Gaza Strip, the Jewish State Army said on Thursday (17). The death has not yet been confirmed by the faction.
Known as “the butcher” due to the violence of his actions, Sinwar (pronounced “sinuár”) was Tel Aviv’s main target in the bombings of Gaza, which have left more than 43,000 dead and almost 100,000 injured — the government by Binyamin Netanyahu has said that the conflict will only end with the dismantling of the group.
Sinwar was born in Khan Yunis, in southern Gaza. Refugees, his parents were among the more than 700,000 Palestinians expelled from their lands with the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. This is an important element in Sinwar’s political formation and his attitudes towards Zionism.
In the 1980s, he was one of those responsible for creating the Majd, a type of internal security apparatus that persecuted and killed Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Tel Aviv. Sinwar hanged and stabbed his enemies, according to Israeli justice investigations. Hence the nickname “butcher of Khan Yunis”.
He met Ahmed Yassin, one of the founders of Hamas, while praying in a Gaza mosque. He later participated in the First Intifada, the Palestinian uprisings against Israel from 1987 to 1993. Captured by Israel in 1988, he was sentenced to four life sentences. He spent 22 years in prison — much of his adult life. Even in prison, he continued to coordinate the persecution of Palestinian collaborators.
Freedom came in 2011, when Israel released 1,026 Palestinians in exchange for soldier Gilad Shalit, captured by Hamas. Sinwar was one of them. The attention he received during his release contributed to his rise.
This long period behind bars explains, in part, Sinwar’s insistence on the release of Palestinian prisoners and the strategy of capturing Israeli civilians and soldiers during the October attacks. Hamas kidnapped around 240 people, used as bargaining chips in negotiations with Israel. In the ceasefire at the end of November last year, the faction released dozens of them in exchange for the release of Palestinian detainees.
Reports released after the start of the conflict, made by people who lived with him, describe Sinwar as someone radical, inflexible and obsessive.
A member of Israeli internal intelligence who interrogated him for more than 150 hours told The Washington Post that Sinwar once forced a Palestinian to bury alive his own brother, accused of being an informant for Israel. It is also believed that in 2015 Sinwar participated in the torture and death of Mahmud Ishtiwi, a Hamas commander accused of corruption. Ishtiwi would also have been punished on suspicion of being homosexual — the terrorist faction preaches a very radical interpretation of Islam, which is not followed by the majority inside Gaza.
Sinwar began heading Hamas inside Gaza in 2017. He became its general leader with the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, killed in an Israeli action at the end of July this year, in Tehran. In recent months, Mohammed Deif, the faction’s military leader, and Marwan Issa, Deif’s number two, were also killed, both in Gaza.
To a certain extent, Sinwar’s radicalism reinforced the Israeli authorities’ discourse of justifying their bombings — which destroyed several parts of Gaza and led to the collapse of the health system — as a battle of good against evil. Netanyahu exploited this rhetoric from the beginning. According to Reuters news agency, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant even had a photograph of Sinwar on his office wall as a reminder of the target.
