Born in a refugee camp in Khan Younis in southern Gaza in 1962, 14 years after the creation of the state of Israel, Yahya Sinwar grew up under foreign occupation—first Egyptian, then Israeli. File | Photo: AP
Right after that Hamas attack in Israel on October 7, 2023which killed around 1,200 people, called in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Yahya Sinwarleader of the Islamist militant group in Gaza and the main architect of the attack. “dead man walking”. A year later, after killing over 42,000 Palestiniansthe vast majority of them women and children, and reducing much of Gaza to rubble, the IDF announced on Thursday (17 October 2024) that it had killed its most wanted man in an operation in of Gaza Rafa.
Born in a refugee camp in Khan Younis in southern Gaza in 1962, 14 years after the establishment of the state of Israel, Sinwar grew up under foreign occupation—first Egyptian, then Israeli. His parents were from Al-Majdal, a city north of Gaza, today known as Ashkelon in Israel proper, from where they were expelled when the state of Israel was established in 1948. About 7,00,000 Palestinians became refugees between 1948-49. in what they call Nakba (disaster). The Sinwar fled south to Gaza.
In an Israeli prison
Sinwar became active in the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s and was first arrested by Israel in 1982 when he was 19 years old. When Hamas was founded in 1987, Sinwar created the group’s internal security organization, al-Majd, which was accused of attacking several Palestinians “for collaborating” with Israel. Sinwar was a brutal enforcer of loyalty. In 1988 he was arrested by the Israelis, convicted of the murder of 12 Palestinians and sentenced to four life sentences. He spent 22 years in Israeli prisons. But prison never broke him. He once told a Shin Bet interrogator, “You know that one day you will be the one who will be interrogated, and I will be standing here as the government, as the interrogator.”
A fluent Hebrew speaker, Sinuar was driven by his deep antipathy to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and deep commitment to the Islamist ideology of Hamas. The Israeli prison was an educational “academy” for him. He said he was “married to the Palestinian cause.” And violence has defined his method since the days when he hunted down the “collaborators”.
Sinwar was released in 2011 as part of a prisoner swap deal in which Israel released 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for one soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was captured by Hamas in 2006. At the time, Hamas was already in power in Gaza and Ismail Haniya was its leader. As a former head of internal security who spent two decades in Israeli prisons, Sinwar already enjoyed cult status among Hamas’s senior ranks. He quickly rose through the ranks of the militant group and forged close ties with Haniya and Hamas’s foreign backers, including Hezbollah and Iran. In 2012, Sinwar traveled to Iran to meet with Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, who was killed by the US in January 2020 in Baghdad.
The ruler of Gaza
In 2017, when Haniyeh became head of the Hamas Politburo. Sinwar was elected leader of the group in Gaza. A year later, in an interview, Sinwar said that his life as the administrator of Gaza, which has been under an Israeli blockade since 2007, was no different from the time he spent in Israeli prisons. “I have only changed the prisons. Still, the old one was much better than this one. I had water, electricity. I had so many books. Gaza is much tougher,” he said. It was also the time when Hamas showed signs of moderation. He had stopped the suicide bombing. Its updated bylaws of 2017 removed the anti-Semitic remarks from its original bylaws. The Hamas leadership has also signaled it would accept the 1967 border as part of a long-term ceasefire with Israel.
But in the coming years, Sinwar would see the Palestinian issue relegated to the corner of West Asia. There were no negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Hamas controlled the blockaded Gaza while Israel continued to deepen its occupation of the West Bank. The settler political class in Israel began to push for the annexation of West Bank settlements. Four Arab countries, including the UAE, will normalize ties with Israel in 2020 in a US-brokered deal. Saudi Arabia, custodian of Islam’s two holiest mosques, was in an advanced stage of recognizing the state of Israel.
October 7 attack
Sinwar’s response to the changes taking place in the region was to launch a murderous attack on Israel. The attack was an immediate success from his point of view – his forces took the Israelis by surprise. Prominent Israeli intelligence agencies failed to predict Sinwar’s move. Hamas fighters unleashed violence for hours in Israeli cities. The political leadership was surprised. But Sinwar may have underestimated the Israeli response. He and millions of Palestinians have had to pay a heavy price for their actions.
Many of the victims of the Hamas attack were Israeli civilians, which shook the country. The ferocity of the attack further isolated Hamas as Israel consolidated support among its allies, including US Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, under whose watch the attack unfolded, launching a war of revenge against the Palestinians in Gaza, destroying much of the enclave. Israel has repeatedly resisted calls for a ceasefire, even amid heavy civilian casualties in Gaza. In the last year it has killed several of its enemies. Mohammed Deif, the head of Hamas’s military wing, was killed on July 13. Haniya was assassinated on July 31 in Tehran. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, was killed in a bombing in Beirut on September 27. And now Sinvar was also killed.
What remains to be seen is whether these killings will provide Israel with the long-term security it seeks, or whether the wounds of the wars Israel has fought will continue to trap the Jewish state in cycles of violence.
Published – October 18, 2024, 12:28 PM IST
