Sinwar, who has striking snow-white hair and jet-black eyebrows, is the leader of Hamas’s political wing in Gaza and one of Israel’s most wanted men.
It holds him and others responsible for the raid into southern Israel on October 7, which killed approximately 1,200 people and kidnapped over 200 more.
In early October, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari stated that the commander, Yahya Sinwar, had died.
“This abominable attack was decided upon by Yahya Sinwar,” said IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi. “Therefore he and all those under him are dead men walking.”
That includes Mohammed Deif, the elusive leader of Hamas’s military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades.
Hugh Lovatt, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), believes Deif was the brains behind the planning of the 7 October attack because it was a military operation, but Sinwar “would likely have been part of the group that planned and influenced it”.
Israel believes that Sinwar, who is effectively second-in-command after Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, is cornered below ground, hiding in tunnels somewhere beneath Gaza with his bodyguards, communicating with no-one for fear that his signal will be tracked and located.
Upbringing and arrests
Sinwar, 61, widely known as Abu Ibrahim, was born in the Khan Younis refugee camp at the southern end of the Gaza Strip. His parents were from Ashkelon, but they became refugees after what Palestinians refer to as “al-Naqba” (the Catastrophe), which was the mass displacement of Palestinians from their ancestral homes in Palestine during the war that followed Israel’s establishment in 1948.
He was educated at Khan Younis Secondary School for Boys and then graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Arabic language from the Islamic University of Gaza.
At that time, Khan Younis was a “bastion” of support for the Muslim Brotherhood, says Ehud Yaari, a fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who interviewed Sinwar in prison four times.
The Islamist group “was a massive movement for young people going to the mosques in the poverty of the refugee camp”, Yaari says, and it would later take on a similar importance for Hamas.
Sinwar was first arrested by Israel in 1982 at the age of 19 for “Islamic activities,” and he was arrested again in 1985. It was around this time that he won the confidence of Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
The two became “very, very close”, says Kobi Michael, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. This relationship with the organization’s spiritual leader would later give Sinwar a “halo effect” within the movement, Michael adds.
Two years after Hamas was founded in 1987, he set up the group’s feared internal security organisation, the al-Majd. He was still only 25.
Al-Majd gained notoriety for punishing those accused of so-called morality offenses – Michael claims he targeted shops that sold “sex videos” – as well as hunting down and killing anyone suspected of collaborating with Israel.
Yaari claims he was responsible for numerous “brutal killings” of people suspected of cooperating with Israel. “Some of them with his own hands and he was proud of that, talking about it to me and to others.”
According to Israeli officials, he later confessed to punishing a suspected informer by getting the man’s brother to bury him alive, finishing the job using a spoon instead of a spade.
“He is the type of man who can gather followers, fans, and many people who are simply afraid of him and do not want to pick fights with him,” Yaari says.
In 1988, Sinwar allegedly planned the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers. He was arrested the same year, convicted by Israel for the murder of 12 Palestinians and given four life sentences.
The prison years
Sinwar has spent a large part of his adult life—over 22 years—in Israeli prisons, from 1988 to 2011. His time there, some of it in solitary confinement, appears to have radicalised him even further.
“He managed to impose his authority ruthlessly, using force,” says Yaari. He positioned himself as a leader among the prisoners, negotiating on their behalf with prison authorities and enforcing discipline among the inmates.
During his imprisonment, the Israeli government described Sinwar as “cruel, authoritative, influential, and with unusual abilities of endurance, cunning, and manipulative, content with little… Keeps secrets even amongst other prisoners…” Has the ability to carry crowds”.
Yaari’s assessment of Sinwar, built up over the times they met, was that he was a psychopath. “But to say about Sinwar, ‘Sinwar is a psychopath, full stop,’ would be a mistake,” he says, “because then you would miss this strange, complex figure.”
Yaari describes him as “extremely cunning and shrewd – a guy who knows how to switch on and off a type of personal charm.”
When Sinwar would tell him Israel must be destroyed and insist there was no place for Jewish people in Palestine, “he would joke, ‘Maybe we’ll make an exception of you'”.