Within days of the 7 October attacks last year, Israeli investigators had identified Yahya Sinwar, then the military leader of Hamas in Gaza, as the mastermind. To their increasing astonishment, they learned that not only had Sinwar conceived of what he called Operation al-Aqsa Flood but he had planned and organised the assault almost alone.
Only a handful of close aides had been let in on the plans, some with only days to go before the attack, in which about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed and 250 abducted, and which triggered an Israeli offensive that has so far killed 42,500 people, also mostly civilians, and left swaths of Gaza in ruins.
Born in a refugee camp in Khan Younis, in the south of Gaza, to parents who had been forced to flee their homes in what became Israel in 1948, Sinwar was drawn into Islamist activism as a teenager. Across the Middle East, a religious resurgence was gathering momentum. As a science student at the Islamic University of Gaza in the early 1980s, Sinwar was drawn to Ahmed Yassin, a charismatic cleric who set up a local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
In 1987, Yassin drafted Sinwar into the newly created group Hamas and made him head of its nascent intelligence service. Duties included uncovering and punishing spies or other “collaborators” with Israel, as well as people in Gaza who infringed Hamas’s strict “morality” codes. This Sinwar accomplished with implacable determination, confessing later to multiple murders of Palestinians.
Arrested in 1988 and given four life sentences for attempted murder and sabotage, he spent 22 years in Israeli jails. In prison, Sinwar refused to talk to any guards and personally punished inmates who did, pressing the face of one into a makeshift stove, according to one Israeli former interrogator who worked at the institution where Sinwar was held. “He’s 1,000% committed and 1,000% violent, a very, very hard man,” the former interrogator said.
Sinwar was a sophisticated political operator with a sharp mind who decided to use his time in prison to study his enemy. He learned Hebrew and read local newspapers and books. On several occasions, Sinwar organised strikes in prison to improve working conditions, and he survived brain cancer in 2008 after being treated by Israeli doctors. He wrote a semi-autobiographical novel describing life and militancy in Gaza.
Though he was among the more than 1,000 prisoners proposed to be swapped in 2011 for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas five years earlier, Sinwar rejected the deal. It went ahead anyway. When Sinwar returned to Gaza, he married and had children and returned immediately to frontline militancy. A journalist who met him at the time told the Guardian that the Hamas leader was so focused it was like “the world didn’t exist beyond his eyeballs”.
Hamas had seized power in Gaza four years earlier and Sinwar rapidly began to build a personal following. He crushed an attempt by independent jihadists to establish a bridgehead in the territory and is widely believed to have been behind the 2016 killing of another senior Hamas commander, Mahmoud Ishtewi, after a power struggle.
With his reputation for ruthless competence well established, Sinwar assumed the overall command of Hamas in Gaza in 2018, consolidating relations between the organisation’s military and civil administrative wings and steadily marginalising the political leadership overseas.
Convinced that the capture of Israeli soldiers was the only way to free prisoners, a task he saw as central to his view of the role of Hamas, Sinwar began to plan a major operation to provide bargaining chips to release Palestinians from Israeli jails.
Quite when he conceived of what became the 7 October attacks is unclear, but versions may have been considered over many years. In 2022, Israel got hold of a Hamas plan for a major attack through the fence, codenamed Jericho Wall. Despite its significance, the plan was filed away because officials believed the group was incapable of such an operation.
Sinwar threw up a smokescreen, lulling Israel into false security with public statements that could mislead, sometimes by coming close to telling the truth. In 2022, Hamas produced a TV series called Fist of the Free, which depicted its militants raiding Israel en masse. Sinwar gave out prizes to all those involved at a public ceremony, praising in a speech the accuracy of the series and saying their work was “an integral part of what we’re preparing”.
Analysts are divided over whether Sinwar foresaw the consequences of the 7 October raid, as well as its primary objectives. It seems clear that he believed Hezbollah would launch a supporting offensive against Israel, which was a mistake, and he may have believed that Israel would not attack Gaza with so many of its citizens held as hostages. Some experts suggest Sinwar was happy to sacrifice Gaza and its population for the greater cause.
After the 7 October attack, Sinwar went into hiding, taking his family with him into the network of tunnels that Hamas had built under Gaza. In August he was appointed overall leader of Hamas after the death of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in an explosion blamed on Israel. Little had been heard from him since, and nothing seen, until Thursday.
The exact circumstances of Sinwar’s death remain unclear, but it appears Israeli troops in northern Gaza engaged three armed men in a firefight, then called in an air or artillery strike and found his body in the rubble of a house. Quite why Sinwar was above ground and armed is also unclear, but he died as he had lived: with an unremitting commitment to Hamas and its ideology, and to violence.
