Hamas’ new political chief Sinwar has a cunning and brutal past

Nearly six years ago, Yahya Sinwar, who’s just been named Hamas’s political leader, scrawled a note on a document that he knew Egyptian intermediaries would hand to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Take a “‘calculated risk’ on a cease-fire,” Sinwar wrote in Hebrew, according to former National Security Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat.

Not long before, the then new Hamas chief for Gaza had said something similar to an Italian journalist: “I don’t want war anymore. I want a cease-fire.” His ambition for the impoverished Palestinian coastal strip? “We can be like Singapore, like Dubai.”

For the past 10 months, since Hamas’ long-planned and bloody Oct. 7 assault, the Israeli security establishment and others have looked back on his words as part of an effort to create the illusion that Hamas, considered a terrorist group by the U.S. and European Union, was limiting its embrace of violence to focus on governance.

“Sinwar’s election effectively marks the subordination of Hamas’s political wing in its entirety to Sinwar,” Arab affairs commentator Avi Issacharoff wrote in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper on Wednesday.

Israeli officials say Sinwar created a sense of complacency around Hamas. The military reduced its surveillance of the Gaza border fence, relying on electronic sensors and transferring troops to guard settlements in the West Bank. Ambitious intelligence officers were focused on Iran; Hamas was considered deterred.

Today, with much of Gaza reduced to rubble as Israel seeks to destroy Hamas, with some 40,000 people killed in the process, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, Sinwar is viewed not only as one of the assault’s masterminds but as the very symbol of Palestinian armed struggle. He’s the top target for assassination, assumed to be hiding deep in a Gaza tunnel, “like a little Hitler in a bunker,” as Netanyahu has often put it.

What effect Sinwar’s selection will have on cease-fire negotiations is unclear. He replaces Ismail Haniyeh as political chief following Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran last week. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied being responsible.

Israeli officials have said that Sinwar was running the negotiations behind the scenes all along. Others say he did at first but he’s now unable to communicate and was given the political title as an act of symbolism, to tell Israel and the world that he is the essence of the movement.

The Oct. 7 attack, in which Hamas killed 1,200 and abducted 250, and the subsequent war in Gaza are remaking regional — even global — politics, raising a risk of broader war. This is especially true in the wake of the recent assassinations of Haniyeh and a Hezbollah leader in Beirut. Israel is bracing for an Iranian response.

Still, it’s notable that the dynamic that gave rise to the current situation is one of intimate enemies. Sinwar and the Israelis have been watching and analyzing one another for decades.

Born in a poor neighborhood of the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis, Sinwar, 61, helped found Hamas’s military wing in the late 1980s as the first Palestinian uprising was underway. He later took on the task of rooting out Palestinians collaborating with Israel, and was found guilty by an Israeli court of killing at least five of them. Israeli military authorities, at the time still operating inside Gaza, sentenced him to life in prison in 1989.

Behind bars, Sinwar achieved deep fluency in Hebrew and knowledge of Israeli society, regularly reading newspapers along with the biographies of key Israeli figures. He also became the uncontested leader of Hamas prisoners. According to Israeli officials and a former Hamas activist, while in prison he continued to have collaborators killed.

Israeli officials describe him as a cold-blooded, magnetic leader; a compact, sinewy man whose close-cropped hair and beard have by now mostly turned white.

In the early 2000s, while in prison, Sinwar began experiencing headaches and blurred vision. He was taken to the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba where a surgeon removed a brain tumor, saving his life.

Betty Lahat, the prison system’s intelligence chief at the time, said in a TV documentary that she tried to use that event to recruit him as an agent.

“I said, the state of Israel saved your life,” she said. “I thought I could turn him into one of ours, but he wasn’t interested. He kept talking about the day he would be released. I told him you’re never getting out. He said there’s a date: God knows it.”

There was a date. It was Oct. 18, 2011, when Israel exchanged more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for an Israeli soldier held by Hamas, Gilad Shalit. Among those released — and the man who drew up the list — was Sinwar.

Because he’d killed fellow Palestinians and not Israelis, and was no longer young, some Israeli officials didn’t object to his being on the list. Others did.

“There was talk of how he was not a threat,” Michael Milshtein, former head of Palestinian research in military intelligence, recalled last year. “He doesn’t want to return to dangerous activity, he’s forgotten how to plan a terror attack. I tried to tell them they were wrong. Hamas is a mission for your whole life. It took him only a week to return to his connections and activities. Today, Hamas in Gaza is Sinwar.”

He rejoined Hamas at a senior level and by 2017 had been elected the group’s leader for all of Gaza, replacing Haniyeh, who was sent to Qatar.

After the October attack, a senior Hamas official, Ali Baraka, told the Russian state channel RT that the group had prepared for Oct. 7 for two years while fooling Israel into thinking it was “busy governing Gaza.” Planning encompassed not only the attack, but also how Hamas would rule in its aftermath.

That was the subject of a 2021 conference in Gaza entitled “The Promise of the End of Days,” where Sinwar delivered the keynote address. A summary document revealed it to have dealt with the topic of what to do with Israeli experts once the country was defeated: “Keep the Jewish scientists and experts in the fields of medicine, engineering, technology, civil and military industry for a while and do not let them leave with their knowledge and experience.”

While Hamas officials never spoke directly to Israeli authorities, Sinwar worked through intermediaries to persuade Israel of his group’s benign intentions. As part of these efforts, he collaborated with the Palestinian Authority to negotiate Israeli work permits for some 18,000 Gazans, allowing them to work as day laborers within Israel.

It was some of these workers who Israeli security officials say drew maps of the communities and made lists of local families to orient the Hamas militants before Oct. 7.

Several released Israeli hostages say that when they were first taken to Gaza, Sinwar came to see them, speaking to them in Hebrew. Israeli military officials say they’ve come close to capturing or killing him a couple of times in the war. So far, he has escaped.

Some 70 kilometers (40 miles) north of Gaza, a poster hangs on the wall of the office of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in Tel Aviv. It features dozens of Hamas commanders with lines drawn across the faces of those killed by Israel. The poster has been filling with marks.

Sinwar, unmarked, is at the top.