A few days after October 7 last year, Israeli investigators identified Yahya Sinwar, then Hamas’s military chief in Gaza, as the mastermind of the surprise attack on Israel.
To their astonishment, they learned that Sinwar had not only conceived what he had called “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” but had planned and organized the assault almost alone. Only a handful of close associates had been informed of the plans, some only days before the attack, which killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, kidnapped more than 250 Israelis and was followed by a Israeli massacre that has so far caused more than 42,000 deaths and devastated the Gaza Strip.
His unwavering commitment to the Hamas cause marked Sinwar’s militant career.
Born in a Khan Younis refugee camp in southern Gaza to parents who had been forced to flee their homes in what became Israel in 1948, Sinwar was drawn to Islamist activism as a teenager. . In the early 1980s, Sinwar, a science student at the Islamic University of Gaza, approached Ahmed Yasin, a charismatic cleric who created a local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
In 1987, Yasin recruited Sinwar to the newly created Hamas group and appointed him head of its fledgling intelligence service. His duties included discovering and punishing Israeli spies and collaborators, as well as people in Gaza who violated Hamas’s strict codes of “morality.” Sinwar determinedly followed through, later confessing to having murdered at least 12 Palestinians.
Arrested in 1988 and sentenced to four life sentences for attempted murder and sabotage, he spent 23 years in Israeli prisons. In prison, Sinwar refused to speak to any Israelis and personally punished those who did, according to a former Israeli interrogator who worked at the institution where Sinwar was held. He also tried to escape repeatedly: “He is 1,000% committed and 1,000% violent, a very, very tough man,” said the interrogator.
But Sinwar was also a subtle political operator with a sharp mind who decided to take advantage of his years in prison to learn Hebrew and study his enemy. On several occasions, Sinwar organized prison strikes to improve working conditions, and survived brain cancer in 2008 after being treated by Israeli doctors. Sinwar also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel in which he describes life and militancy in Gaza.
He was to be among more than 1,000 prisoners to be exchanged in 2011 for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas five years earlier, but Sinwar rejected the deal. The agreement was carried out anyway, and Sinwar, back in Gaza, immediately returned to the front line of militancy. A journalist who met him at the time told The Guardian that the Hamas leader was so focused that it was as if “the world did not exist beyond his eyes.”
In Gaza, where Hamas had seized power four years earlier, Sinwar married, had children and quickly began to gain followers. He crushed an attempt by independent jihadists to establish a bridgehead in the territory and is credited with the 2016 assassination of another senior Hamas commander, Mahmoud Ishtewi, in an internal power struggle.
With his reputation for determination well established, Sinwar assumed overall command of Hamas in Gaza in 2018, consolidating relations between the organization’s military and civilian administrative wings and progressively alienating the political leadership abroad.
Convinced that capturing Israeli soldiers was the “only way to free prisoners,” a task he considered central to his vision of Hamas’s role, Sinwar began planning a major operation to provide bargaining chips to free Palestinians from the Israeli prisons.
It is not clear when he conceived what became the October 7 attacks, but it is possible that he had weighed different plans over many years. In 2022, Israel seized a Hamas plan for a major attack through the fence, codenamed Jericho Wall. Despite its importance, the plan was shelved because authorities believed the group was incapable of carrying out such an operation.
Sinwar also laid a smokescreen, lulling Israel into false security with potentially misleading public statements.
In 2022, Hamas produced a television series called Fist of the Free, which showed its militants raiding Israel en masse. Sinwar presented awards to all participants at a public ceremony, praising the accuracy of the series in a speech and stating that their work was “an integral part of what we are preparing.”
Analysts are divided over whether Sinwar foresaw the consequences of the October 7 raid, as well as its primary objectives. It seems clear that he believed that Hezbollah would launch a supporting offensive against Israel – which did not happen – and perhaps he may have thought that Israel would not attack Gaza in the way it has been doing for a year with so many Israeli hostages.
After the October 7 attack, Sinwar went into hiding, possibly in the network of tunnels that Hamas has built under southern Gaza. Until his assassination by Israel.
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