The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) announced on Thursday that killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar during the attack in Gaza.
Sinwar was "eliminated" on Wednesday in Tel Sultan, a neighborhood in Gaza's southernmost city, Rafah, it said Israeli army.
The organizer of the October 7 attack
After the attack Hamas on Israel on October 7 last year, Israeli investigators quickly identified Yahya Sinwar, then the military leader of Hamas in Gaza, as the mastermind. To their growing surprise, they discovered that not only did Sinwar design what he called the "Al-Aqsa Flood" operation, but he almost single-handedly planned and organized the attack, writes the Guardian.
Only a few close associates were aware of the plan for the attack, which killed around 1.200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped 250 people. This event sparked an Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip that has so far killed around 42.500 people, mostly women and children, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. The United Nations Office for Human Rights assumes that this number is higher.
Attracted to Islamist extremism from a young age
Sinwar was born in 1962 in a refugee camp in Khan Yunis, in the south of Gaza. At that time, a religious revival was gaining strength throughout the Middle East, and Sinwar was already attracted to Islamist activism as a teenager. As a natural sciences student at the Islamic University of Gaza in the early 1980s, he was drawn to the beliefs of the charismatic cleric Ahmed Yassin, founder of the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
In 1987, Yassin inducted Sinwar into the newly founded Hamas group and made him head of its fledgling intelligence service. His duties included detecting and punishing spies or other "collaborators" of Israel, as well as people in Gaza who violated Hamas's strict "moral" code. Sinwar carried this out with relentless determination, later admitting to killing a number of Palestinians.
He was arrested in 1988 and sentenced to four life sentences for attempted murder and sabotage, and spent 22 years in Israeli prisons. In prison, he refused to talk to guards and personally punished prisoners who did so, according to a former Israeli interrogator who worked at the institution where Sinwar was imprisoned.
"He is 1000 percent dedicated and 1000 percent violent, a very tough man," the former investigator said.
Learned Hebrew in prison
Sinwar was a sophisticated political operative with a sharp mind. He decided to use his time in prison to study his enemy. He learned Hebrew and read local newspapers and books. He repeatedly organized strikes in prison to improve working conditions, and in 2008 he survived a brain tumor after being treated by Israeli doctors. He wrote a semi-autobiographical novel describing life and struggle in Gaza.
Although in 2011 he was among more than 1000 prisoners offered in exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas five years earlier, Sinwar rejected the deal. Nevertheless, the exchange was carried out. When Sinwar returned to Gaza, he married, had children, and immediately returned to the front lines of militant action. One journalist who met him at the time told the Guardian that the Hamas leader was so focused it seemed as if "the world did not exist outside his eyes".
Taking the lead
Hamas had seized power in Gaza four years earlier, and Sinwar quickly began building a personal base of supporters. He crushed an attempt by independent jihadists to establish a foothold in the territory and is widely believed to be behind the killing of another senior Hamas commander, Mahmoud Ishtiwi, in 2016 following a power struggle.
With an established reputation for ruthless efficiency, Sinwar assumed overall command of Hamas in Gaza in 2018, consolidating relations between the organization's military and civilian administrative wings and gradually marginalizing the political leadership abroad.
Convinced that capturing Israeli soldiers was the only way to free Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons, Sinwar began planning a major operation that would provide leverage for negotiations to free the Palestinians.
Preparing the attack
Exactly when he masterminded the October 7 attack is unclear, but versions of the attack are believed to have been discussed for years. In 2022, Israel received Hamas's plan for a major attack through the fence, codenamed Jericho Wall. Despite its importance, it was neglected because officials believed the group was incapable of such an operation.
In 2022, Hamas produced a TV series called Fist of the Free, which depicted its fighters mass-attacking Israel. At a public ceremony, Sinwar presented awards to all participants, praising the accuracy of the series and saying their work was "an integral part of what we are preparing."
Analysts are divided on whether Sinwar foresaw the consequences of the October 7 attack, as well as its primary objectives. As they claim, it is clear that he believed that Hezbollah would launch an auxiliary offensive against Israel, which was a mistake, and he may also have believed that Israel would not attack Gaza while holding hostages. Some experts suggest that Sinwar was willing to sacrifice Gaza and its population for a higher cause.
After October 7th
After the October 7 attack, Sinwar, along with his family, retreated into hiding in a network of tunnels built by Hamas under Gaza. In August, he was installed as the leader of Hamas after the death of Ismail Haniyeh in an explosion in Tehran blamed on Israel. Little has been heard from him since, and nothing was seen, until Thursday.
The exact circumstances of Sinwar's death remain unclear, but it appears that Israeli troops in northern Gaza engaged in a firefight with the three gunmen and called in an air or artillery strike.
The Israelis released a video of the last moments of the head of Hamas. When they discovered that someone was in the destroyed building, the IDF sent a drone to film who exactly it was. What the camera recorded is incredible – Sinwar is sitting injured in an armchair and trying to shoot the drone with a stick.
Why the Hamas leader was above ground and armed is also unclear, but he died as he lived - with an unrelenting commitment to Hamas and its ideology.
