After Hamas attacked Israel in October, sparking war in Gaza, Israeli leaders described the group’s top official in the territory, Yahya Sinwar, as a “living dead man.” Viewing him as an architect of the attack, Israel has presented Sinwar’s assassination as a major target of its devastating counterattack.
Seven months later, Sinwar’s survival is emblematic of the failures of Israel’s war, which has devastated much of Gaza but left Hamas’ top leaders largely intact and failed to free most of the captives captured during the attack. October.
Even as Israeli officials seek his assassination, they have been forced to negotiate with him, however indirectly, to free the remaining hostages. Sinwar has emerged not only as a strong-willed commander but also as a shrewd negotiator who has prevented an Israeli victory on the battlefield while engaging Israeli envoys at the negotiating table, according to Hamas, Israeli and US officials. Some spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence assessments of Mr. Sinwar and diplomatic negotiations.
While the talks are being mediated by Egypt and Qatar, it is Sinwar – believed to be hidden in a network of tunnels beneath Gaza – whose consent is required by Hamas negotiators before accepting any concessions, according to some of those. officials.
Hamas officials insist that Sinwar does not have the final say in the group’s decisions. But while Sinwar does not technically have authority over the entire Hamas movement, his leadership role in Gaza and forceful personality have given him enormous importance in how he operates Hamas, according to allies and enemies alike.
“No decision can be made without consulting Sinwar,” said Salah al-Din al-Awawdeh, a Hamas member and political analyst who befriended Sinwar while both were imprisoned in Israel during the 1990s and 2000s. “Sinwar He is not just any leader, he is a powerful person and an architect of events. He is not some kind of manager or director, he is a leader,” al-Awawdeh added.
Sinwar has rarely been heard from since the start of the war, unlike Hamas officials based outside Gaza, including Ismail Haniyeh, the movement’s highest-ranking civilian official. Although nominally junior to Haniyeh, Sinwar has been central to Hamas’s behind-the-scenes decision to demand a permanent ceasefire, U.S. and Israeli officials say.
Waiting for Sinwar’s approval has often slowed negotiations, according to officials and analysts. Israeli strikes have damaged much of Gaza’s communications infrastructure, and it has sometimes taken a day to send a message to Sinwar and a day to receive a response, according to U.S. officials and Hamas members.
For Israeli and Western officials, over the course of these negotiations, which stalled again in Cairo last week, Sinwar emerged as a brutal adversary and a skilled political operator, able to analyze Israeli society and appear to adapt his policies accordingly. . .
As the architect of the October 7 attacks, Sinwar devised a strategy that he knew would provoke a fierce Israeli response. But by Hamas’ calculations, the deaths of many Palestinian civilians (who do not have access to Hamas’s underground tunnels) were the necessary cost to alter the status quo with Israel.
American and Israeli intelligence agencies have spent months assessing Sinwar’s motivations, according to people briefed on the intelligence. Analysts in both the United States and Israel believe that Sinwar is motivated primarily by a desire to take revenge on Israel and weaken it. The well-being of the Palestinian people or the establishment of a Palestinian state, intelligence analysts say, appear to be secondary.
An understanding of Israeli society
Sinwar was born in Gaza in 1962 to a family that had fled their home, along with several hundred thousand other Palestinian Arabs who fled or were forced to flee during the wars surrounding the creation of the State of Israel.
Sinwar joined Hamas in the 1980s. He was later imprisoned for murdering Palestinians whom he accused of apostasy or collaborating with Israel, according to Israeli court records from 1989. Sinwar spent more than two decades detained in Israel before being released in 2011. , along with more than 1,000 other Palestinians. in exchange for an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas. Six years later, Sinwar was elected leader of Hamas in Gaza.
While in prison, Sinwar learned Hebrew and developed an understanding of Israeli culture and society, according to other former inmates and Israeli officials who monitored him in prison. Now Sinwar appears to be using that knowledge to sow divisions in Israeli society and increase pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, according to Israeli and US officials.
They believe Sinwar has timed the release of videos of some Israeli hostages to spark public outrage against Netanyahu during crucial phases of the ceasefire talks.
Some Israelis want the remaining hostages freed even if it means accepting Hamas’ demands for a permanent truce that would keep the group – and Sinwar – in power. But Netanyahu has been reluctant to agree to end the war, partly due to pressure from some of his right-wing allies, who have threatened to resign if the war ends with Hamas intact.
If Netanyahu has been accused of prolonging the fighting for personal gain, so has his archenemy, Sinwar.
Israeli and American intelligence officials say Sinwar’s strategy is to keep the war going for as long as necessary to destroy Israel’s international reputation and damage its relationship with its main ally, the United States. As Israel faced intense pressure to avoid launching an operation in Rafah, Hamas fired rockets last Sunday from Rafah toward a nearby border crossing, killing four Israeli soldiers.
If this was a Hamas tactic, it seemed to bear fruit: Israel launched an operation last week on the outskirts of Rafah, and in that context, President Biden issued his harshest criticism of Israeli policy since the war began. Biden said he would halt some future arms shipments if the Israeli military began a large-scale invasion of the city’s urban core.
Projecting an image of unity
Hamas and its allies deny that Sinwar or the movement are trying to take advantage of greater Palestinian suffering.
“Hamas’ strategy is to stop the war right now,” said Ahmed Yousef, a Hamas veteran based in Rafah. “To stop the genocide and the killing of the Palestinian people.”
US officials say Sinwar has shown disdain for his colleagues outside Gaza, who were not informed about the precise plans for the Hamas attack on October 7. American officials also believe that Sinwar approves of military operations carried out by Hamas, although Israeli intelligence officials say they are unsure of the extent of his involvement.
A senior Western official familiar with the ceasefire negotiations believes that Sinwar appears to make decisions in conjunction with his brother, Muhammad, a senior Hamas military leader, and that throughout the war he had sometimes been at odds with the leaders. of Hamas outside Gaza. While outside leaders have at times been more willing to make deals, Sinwar is less willing to cede ground to Israeli negotiators, in part because he knows he is likely to be killed whether the war ends or not, the official said. . .
Even if negotiators seal a ceasefire agreement, Israel is likely to persecute Sinwar for the rest of his life, the official said.
Hamas members have projected an image of unity, downplaying Sinwar’s personal role in decision-making and maintaining that elected Hamas leaders collectively determine the movement’s trajectory.
Some say that if Sinwar has played a larger role during this war, it is mainly due to his position: as leader of Hamas in Gaza, Sinwar has more say, although not the final decision, according to Mousa Abu Marzouk. , a senior Hamas official based in Qatar.
“Sinwar’s opinion is very important because he is on the ground and leads the movement inside,” said Abu Marzouk, the first leader of Hamas’s political office in the 1990s.
But Haniyeh has the “final say” on key decisions, Abu Marzouk said, adding that all Hamas political leaders had “the same opinion.” Haniyeh could not immediately be reached for comment.
Still, there is something unusual about Sinwar’s force of personality, according to al-Awawdeh, his prison friend. Other leaders may not have instigated the Oct. 7 attack, preferring to focus on technocratic governance issues, al-Awawdeh said.
“If someone else had been in his position, things might have gone more smoothly,” he said.
Mr. Sinwar himself could not be reached for comment and has rarely been heard from since October. American and Israeli officials have said Sinwar hides near hostages and uses them as human shields. An Israeli hostage who was freed during a truce in November said she met Sinwar during his captivity.
In February, the Israeli military released a video it said soldiers had taken from a security camera they found in a Hamas tunnel beneath Gaza. The video showed a man running through the tunnel, accompanied by a woman and children.
The military said the man was Mr. Sinwar, who was fleeing with his family.
The claim was impossible to verify: the man’s face was turned away from the camera.