Yahya Sinwar, architect of the Oct. 7 terror attacks on Israel, confirmed killed
Yahya Sinwar, the elusive Hamas leader widely credited with masterminding the Oct. 7 terror attacks on Israel, was confirmed dead Thursday, ending a yearlong manhunt for the militant chief.
He was 61.
The Israel Defense Forces said Sinwar was killed by soldiers in an operation in southern Gaza on Wednesday.
Sinwar who was born in a refugee camp and spent years in an Israeli prison before rising to the top of the Iran-backed militant group, was described as a “dead man walking” by the Israeli military in the days after the Oct. 7 attacks. But he managed to evade capture for over a year.
The only sighting of him before his death was in grainy footage taken on Oct. 10, 2023, three days after Hamas’ assault, according to the Israeli military. It showed him fleeing with his family into a tunnel, one of a large network build by Hamas under Gaza, which the militant group used to smuggle weapons, hide out from Israeli attacks and keep Israeli hostages captive.
“The death of Sinwar for Israel is the equivalent to the death of Osama Bin Laden to the United States,” Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think tank told NBC News earlier this year. “He is the mastermind of the worst terrorist attack the nation has ever suffered — more broadly, the worst attack suffered by Jews in any one day since the Holocaust.”
He added that he did not think Sinwar’s death would reverse or change Hamas’ trajectory, “but it does remove a particularly hard-line fundamentalist leader.”
Sinwar was born in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, to parents who came from Al-Majdal, a Palestinian village in what is now the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon. They were displaced in what Palestinians call the Nakba, “catastrophe” in Arabic, of 1948, when around 700,000 people were forced from their homes in the founding of Israel.
Educated at Khan Younis Secondary School for Boys, Sinwar would go on to receive bachelor’s degree in Arabic language from the Islamic University of Gaza.
Sinwar joined Hamas after it was founded in 1987 and quickly gained a reputation for brutality after he reportedly helped to form the militant group’s intelligence service, Munazzamat al Jihad w’al-Dawa, according to a profile of him by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), a think tank.
The service’s goal was to identify Palestinian collaborators working for Israel.
Arrested by Israel in 1988, Sinwar admitted to killing 12 suspected collaborators, earning him the nickname “The Butcher of Khan Younis.” He was sentenced to four life terms for offenses that included the killing of two Israeli soldiers, attempted murder and sabotage.
Being behind bars did not stop Sinwar from rising through the ranks, according to Michael Koubi, a former Israeli intelligence officer with the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency.
Koubi told NBC News in February that he had spent more than 150 hours interrogating Sinwar, and that the Hamas leader used his time in captivity to learn Hebrew — the language of his enemies.
“He read all the books about the Israeli leaders, about the history, about the geography, about everything that he can read on Israel. He even translates books from Hebrew to Arabic,” Koubi said.
Contrary to the assessment of some of his fellow officers, Koubi said he did not believe Sinwar was a psychopath, and he watched as Sinwar quickly became a leader among the Palestinian prisoners.
“It’s fair to say that he studied the Israelis better than they did him,” Levitt said, adding that Sinwar learned “how Israelis think, what makes them tick, how their society thinks.”
Sinwar survived brain cancer in 2008 after being treated by Israeli doctors and was released three years later. He was one of more than 1,000 Palestinians freed in exchange for one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who had been taken hostage by Hamas and held for five years. At the time, emotions were mixed in Israel over the lopsided exchange, which allowed some violent prisoners to walk free.
Almost immediately after his release, Sinwar, then 49, married Samer Abu-Zamr, a woman 18 years his junior, in a simple wedding in Khan Younis. He became a father to two boys and a girl in his 50s, relatively late in a Palestinian culture in which parents often have children much younger. His children’s status and whereabouts are unknown.
As a result of his time in prison, Sinwar was “so tuned in to the sensitivities within Israeli society” and how it would think about the hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7, Levitt said.
In 2015, the State Department categorized Sinwar as a “specially designated global terrorist.”
Two years later he was elected Hamas’ leader in Gaza in a secret ballot and placed in charge of the day-to-day governance there.
On taking over, Sinwar attempted to improve relations with Egypt and Fatah, the secular Palestinian political party that partially runs the occupied West Bank and rivals Hamas in Gaza, according to the ECFR profile.
Israel’s security establishment — as well as independent analysts — also concluded that, while Sinwar had not abandoned his hard-line views, he was more interested in governing Gaza than using it as a base for attacks on Israel.
His leadership was not without its challenges, however, and in 2021 Sinwar needed a run-off ballot in Hamas’s opaque internal elections to retain his post against an old rival, Nizar Awadallah.
Some analysts saw this as a potential turning point, because a few months later Israel and Hamas fought an 11-day war, after which Sinwar claimed “victory” — perched on a chair in the rubble of what had been his home.
The following December, in a speech to thousands of cheering supporters he said that Hamas would deploy a “flood” of fighters and rockets against Israel.
Less than a year later, Hamas militants rampaged through southern Israel, carrying out the worst terrorist attack in the country’s history. Israeli officials say 1,200 died and over 240 were taken hostage. Health officials in Gaza say that more than 42,000 people have died in Israel’s subsequent invasion.
“The Israeli assessment that Sinwar prioritized his governance project in Gaza over attacking Israel was wrong,” Levitt said. “In fact, he was for years, at least two, specifically planning how to do an attack that would be so gruesome that the Israelis would have to go into Gaza.”
Sinwar, Levitt added, understood that he “would lose his governance project in Gaza,” and welcomed the opportunity to be relieved of it.
Within days of the Oct. 7 attacks, Sinwar was being credited as their mastermind, along with Mohammed Deif, the head of Hamas’ armed wing.
Israel said in August that it had confirmed Deif’s death but Sinwar was able to evade the Israeli military — until this week.
Military commanders, current and former security officials and experts who have liaised with Hamas in the past told NBC News in January that he most likely stayed on the move, changing locations to avoid detection and hiding out in the deep maze of tunnels that Hamas had dug below Gaza.
But that didn’t stop him from becoming Hamas’ political leader in August after the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. Haniyeh was killed in an explosion after he had participated in the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.
Israel has been blamed for the strike, which also killed Haniyeh’s bodyguard, but has not commented on the attack.
But now that Sinwar’s luck has run out, there will be others to take his place, according to Kobi Michael, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, a Tel Aviv-based think tank.
While his death was “a very symbolic achievement” for Israel, he said “it will not eliminate Hamas.”
“Hamas is more than one organization and more than its leaders,” he said, adding that the militant group is “a semi-state entity, with institutions, with regulations and with traditions.”
In the eyes of many people, Michael said that Sinwar’s death “will glorify him further and add to his legend.” But he said for some Palestinians, “it will be a great relief because there are people in the Gaza Strip that don’t like the idea of being ruled by Hamas and Sinwar. He is a very brutal, cruel man.”
However, Michael also credited Sinwar with being “very determined, very ideological and he had a very clear compass and he knew exactly the horizons he wanted to reach.”
“I don’t see any leader on the scale of Sinwar,” he added. “But there are other leaders with other capabilities, maybe more qualified than him, who could emerge.”
Source » yahoo.com
