The ruthless murderer who spoke Hebrew and wrote a novel

Yahya Sinwar, the de facto leader of Hamas, lived by the maxim “know your enemy.”

Israeli officials said the suspected mastermind of the Oct. 7 attacks was killed by Israeli troops during an operation in southern Gaza. There was no immediate confirmation of his death from Hamas.

Sinwar grew up in poverty in a refugee camp in the southern Gaza town of Khan Yunis, where his family fled after Israel’s 1948 war of independence, which Palestinians call the Nakba – the catastrophe – when some 800,000 people were displaced.

The young Sinwar was active in paramilitary groups and was arrested twice by Israel before the founding of Hamas in 1987. He co-founded the group’s internal security force, Majd, and became a confidant of its spiritual father, the wheelchair-bound Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

In 1988, Sinwar was arrested again for the killing of two Israeli soldiers and sentenced to four life sentences. “I did what I did and I don’t regret it,” he is reported to have said later.

The prisoner devoted 22 years to studying Israel in a prison in the Negev Desert, mastering the Hebrew language and reading works by and about the architects of modern Zionism from Ze’ev Jabotinsky to Menachem Begin. He gained enough respect for Israel’s surveillance capabilities to avoid electronic devices.

In an Israeli television interview during his detention, conducted in Hebrew, Sinwar appeared to soften his hardline positions and raised the prospect of a long-term ceasefire. “We know we are not capable of destroying Israel,” he said, referring to Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

While behind bars, the future leader wrote a novel, “The Thorns and the Cloves,” published in 2004, which combined his personal biography with the history of the Palestinian struggle. That same year, Israeli doctors saved his life by treating a brain tumor.

But Sinwar never gave up militancy. He was accused of conspiring with Hamas leaders in Gaza to kidnap Israeli soldiers for a prisoner exchange.

This plot was foiled, but another was realized when Hamas captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. In 2011, Sinwar was one of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners swapped for Shalit in an unprecedented deal.

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Sinwar quickly rose through Hamas’s political ranks after his release, being elected to the Politburo in 2012 and replacing Ismail Haniyeh as the group’s leader in Gaza in 2017. He sought to strengthen ties with the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance” against Israel.

The militant leader was known for his brutality and ruthlessness towards Palestinians and Israelis. His security forces hunted down, tortured and killed suspected collaborators and dissidents, including Hamas commander Mahmoud Ishtiwi, who was accused of corruption and homosexuality.

But Israeli leaders appeared to see him as a source of stability in Gaza and a man with whom they could do business. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu facilitated payments from Qatar to Hamas under his rule. On October 7, 2023, the Israeli security authorities were surprised.

“We didn’t understand him at all,” said Michael Milstein, a former Israeli military intelligence officer and Hamas specialist.

Analysts are divided over what role he played in the Oct. 7 attacks, with some suggesting that the commander of Hamas’s military wing, Mohammed Deif, would have played a more central role.

Sinwar “would probably have been part of the group that planned it and influenced it,” Hugh Lovatt, Middle East analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told the BBC.

From that moment on, he was a “dead man walking,” Israeli officials said. A year-long manhunt followed that finally ended on Thursday.