After a shadowy profession spent in Israeli prisons and Hamas’s inside safety equipment, Yahya Sinwar emerged because the Palestinian group’s chief after serving to set off a full-blown battle that engulfed the area.
Sinwar is among the many Hamas leaders accused of masterminding the group’s assault on Israel on October 7 final yr, and was stated to be hiding in a community of tunnels the militants had constructed underneath Gaza.
On Thursday, Israel stated it was inspecting whether or not it had killed the 61-year-old Sinwar in an operation in Gaza, in what would represent a significant blow to the group.
Sinwar was the top of Hamas in Gaza through the October 7 assault, however turned the group’s total chief in August after the killing of political chief Ismail Haniyeh.
Haniyeh’s killing in Tehran on July 31 was extensively attributed to Israel, which by no means claimed accountability for the assassination.
Also in July, Israel stated it had killed Hamas army chief Mohammed Deif, however the group by no means confirmed his dying.
“Every member of Hamas is a lifeless man,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated final yr after the October 7 assault sparked the Gaza battle.
– Punish collaborators –
The Hamas assault killed 1,206 individuals in Israel, based on an AFP tally based mostly on official Israeli knowledge that features hostages killed in captivity.
Israel’s retaliatory marketing campaign in Gaza has killed 42,438 individuals, principally civilians, based on Health Ministry knowledge within the Hamas-controlled territory.
The Oct. 7 assault, most likely deliberate for a yr or two, “took everybody without warning” and “modified the steadiness of energy on the bottom,” stated Leila Seurat of the Arab Center for Research and Political Studies in Paris.
Sinwar is the safety operator “par excellence”, based on Abu Abdallah, a Hamas member who spent years at his facet in Israeli prisons.
“He takes selections with the utmost calm, however he’s intractable relating to defending Hamas pursuits,” Abu Abdallah instructed AFP in 2017, after his former co-detainee was elected Hamas chief in Gaza.
Born in Khan Yunis refugee camp in southern Gaza, Sinwar joined Hamas when Sheikh Ahmad Yassin based the group across the time of the primary Palestinian intifada in 1987.
Sinwar established the group’s inside safety equipment the next yr and have become head of an intelligence unit devoted to ruthlessly monitoring down and punishing – generally killing – Palestinians accused of offering info to Israel.
According to a transcript of an interrogation with safety officers revealed by Israeli media, Sinwar stated he strangled an alleged collaborator with a keffiyeh scarf in a cemetery in Khan Yunis.
A graduate of the Islamic University of Gaza, he realized good Hebrew throughout his 23 years in Israeli prisons and is claimed to have a deep understanding of Israeli tradition and society.
– ‘Radical and pragmatic’ –
He was serving 4 life sentences for the killing of two Israeli troopers when he turned the oldest of 1,027 Palestinians launched in alternate for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011.
Sinwar later turned a senior commander of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the army wing of Hamas, earlier than taking on total management of the motion in Gaza.
While his predecessor, Haniyeh, had inspired Hamas’s efforts to current a reasonable face to the world, Sinwar most well-liked to deliver the Palestinian concern to the fore by extra violent means.
Sinwar is claimed to have fought for a single Palestinian state uniting the Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank – managed by Mahmud Abbas’s Fatah get together – and the annexation of east Jerusalem.
He has vowed to punish anybody who stands in the best way of reconciliation with Fatah, the rival political motion with which Hamas has engaged in factional preventing for the reason that 2006 election, based on the US assume tank Council on Foreign Relations.
This assembly stays elusive, however prisoner releases ensuing from November’s transient truce settlement with Israel have seen Hamas’ reputation soar within the West Bank.
According to Seurat, Sinwar pursued a path that led him to be “radical in army planning and pragmatic in politics”.
“He doesn’t advocate pressure for its personal sake, however to enter into negotiations” with Israel, he stated.
The Hamas chief was added in 2015 to the US checklist of most wished “worldwide terrorists”.
Vowing in November to “discover and get rid of” Sinwar, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant urged Gazans handy over Sinwar, including that “should you attain him earlier than us, the battle shall be shortened.”
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