Israel claims to have killed Yahya Sinwar in Tel el Sultan, north of the city of Rafah. So in the far south of the Gaza Strip. The photos that Israeli military sources shared on social media seem unequivocal.
I republish, below, the biography I had posted in the aftermath of Sinwar’s appointment as head of the Hamas politburo, following the extrajudicial targeted assassination in Tehran on July 31st, 2024, of Ismail Haniyeh, also attributed to the Israelis.
Yahya Sinwar is the new head of Hamas’ central politburo. He replaces Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in an extrajudicial targeted assassination for which Israel did not take direct and public responsibility but instead informed members of the US administration, according to US sources who spoke with the Washington Post (printed issue, August 7). Haniyeh was killed in Tehran on July 31, while he was in the war veterans’ residence, a guest of the Iranian regime, precisely on the day after the inauguration ceremony of the new president, the reformist Masoud Pezeshkian. The murder had, as it is self-evident, a double significance: a blow to Hamas, through the assassination of its political leader, and a blow to Iran, wounded both by the security loopholes and, above all, because Haniyeh’s killing took place at a time when dignitaries from all over the world were present in Tehran.
The question of the time and place of Haniyeh’s murder is part of his succession and of Sinwar’s choice. This is not the first time Hamas has found itself urgently choosing its most politically prominent exponent. It had already happened with the extrajudicial targeted assassination carried out by Israel on March 22, 2004, against Sheykh Ahmed Yassin, founder of the Islamic Resistance Movement (this is the meaning of the acronym Hamas). Number two, Abdel Aziz al Rantisi, was immediately put in Yassin’s place, and Israel killed him a month later. Just as it had attempted to kill seven years earlier – it was 1997 – the head of the politburo, Khaled Meshaal: an attempted assassination that the Mossad had carried out, on the orders of the then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a garage in Amman, Jordan. The Mossad agents had been seized, and Israel had been forced to send King Hussein of Jordan the antidote to the poison they had injected into Meshaal’s neck.
The strategy of ‘beheading the snake’ has, in essence, never worked. And yet Israel continues to pursue it, both in the case of apical figures considered pragmatic (Haniyeh) and in the case of exponents of the military wing (Mohammed Deif, if his killing is confirmed, or the former founder and head of the Izzedin al Qassam Brigades, Salah Shehadeh). Whatever the objective of Tel Aviv’s strategy, Hamas reacts in ways that are independent of what the different Israeli governments, moreover of different political tones over the decades, have in mind.
Hamas, therefore, decides not to choose a leader abroad, a leader from the diaspora, a figure from the establishment who is forbidden to go to Palestine. Haniyeh had gone abroad and had to leave Gaza, where he had always lived in his home in the heart of the Shati refugee camp. He left Gaza to manage the position of head of the politburo without the prohibitions imposed by the Israelis on the Strip. The Islamic Resistance Movement, therefore, decides to change course, do a straight U-turn, and make Gaza even more central, at a time when Gaza is almost entirely destroyed. It decides, namely, to indicate Sinwar as Haniyeh’s successor: from a Gaza leader to a Gaza leader, confirming that the specific weight of the Strip, in the balance and politics of Hamas, is increasingly heavy. It was unanimously decided, says Osama Hamdan, one of the leaders who lives in Beirut: the underlining is not a detail because it is intended to indicate the unity of the leadership that appointed Sinwar as head of the politburo pending the elections for the renewal of the entire movement’s establishment that are scheduled, as always, every four years, and therefore in 2025.
Until a few days before, different names had been mentioned than Sinwar’s. Including the name of the chairman of the Shura Council, which indicates the proper interim until the 2025 elections. The decision taken on August 6 of succession as definite as Yahya Sinwar’s combines different meanings. First, it confirms that the Strip cannot but be central, particularly after ten months of the Israeli war on Gaza following the October 7 attack. Sinwar concentrates on himself both political power (he is the elected head of the Gaza constituency politburo) and military power, due to his and his brother Mohammed’s leading role in the Izzedin al Qassam Brigades, both among the architects of the October 7 attack. The second element goes directly to Tehran, as Sinwar is more inclined towards more robust support from Iran than other leaders who ‘diversify’ Hamas’ international relations by asking for support from different countries. Finally, it is possible that the decision also concerns the security of the leadership: confirmation comes from one of the first statements on the Israeli side, which speaks of Sinwar as a target for Tel Aviv as the leader of Hamas. He already was the principal target before he became the politburo’s chairman.
What about the negotiations? What fate will the negotiations have with the presence of another, tougher and more radical type of negotiator? In part, it is not certain that the talks will break down. Sinwar has always been present: Osama Hamdan made this point immediately after announcing Sinwar’s appointment as head of the Politburo. It is a fact that Sinwar’s presence, a blatant expression of the link between the military wing and the political wing, changed the reality on the ground. To such an extent that, from October 7 onwards, throughout the unfolding of the war in Gaza and in the feeble negotiations that have been ongoing for months, it has become indispensable for Hamas to receive from inside Gaza, from the political-military leadership, approval on every decision regarding the negotiations. Over these ten months, this has always been said by all those who – on the Hamas side – have made public statements on the state of negotiations.
Sinwar’s political bio
A third of life was spent in a cell as if it was a time freeze in Yahya Sinwar’s militancy inside Hamas. His biographical notes disseminated throughout the media channels after October 7, 2023, describe Yahya Sinwar’s interest in books, as a reader and then as a writer. They tell us of his meticulous learning of Hebrew and scrutiny of Israeli society, so much so that he has translated texts from Hebrew into Arabic, mainly focused on examining Israeli society and its security apparatus. A translation of a book by Carmi Gillon, former head of the Shabak, Israel’s internal security service, is included.
Much less attention, though, is paid to Sinwar’s political role, which he maintained and indeed strengthened during his imprisonment.
As is customary in Palestinian activism, Yahya Sinwar did not stop his political engagement while imprisoned. On the contrary, he strengthened his leading role within Hamas in the almost 22 years he spent in jail between his arrest in 1988 and his release in 2011, when he led the list of 1027 Palestinians freed in exchange for the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit’s liberation. Entering prison did not mean, at least before October 2023, leaving activism for Palestinians who adhered to the factions. On the contrary, prisoners have been key actors, especially during the decisive Palestinian political transition when the two leading and competing figures disappeared one after another in 2004: Sheykh Ahmed Yassin was murdered in an Israeli extrajudicial killing, and Yasser Arafat died after a long illness.
Constraint inside the Israeli detention system, prisoners have been, in fact, protagonists of the only inter-factional attempt at unity and reconciliation on the Palestinian political scene. The so-called Prisoners’ Document, released in the Spring of 2006, attempted to mend that dangerous rift between Fatah and Hamas that eventually led in June 2007 to the complete rupture between the two main Palestinian movements and the separation between the PA-led West Bank and Hamas-ruled Gaza.
Yahya Sinwar was one of the Document’s leading contributors, along with Marwan Barghouthi (Fatah) and Ahmed Saadat (PFLP). Until his release, he led the crucial “prison constituency,” one of the four Hamas constituencies that, together with the West Bank, Gaza, and Abroad, embody the movement’s organizational sectors. According to Yuval Bitton, one of the Israeli doctors assigned to the high-security prison near Bersheva who treated Sinwar and with whom he exchanged hundreds of hours of conversations (I had met Dr. Bitton in 2005 during a visit to the prison accorded to me by the Israeli authorities to interview members of the Palestinian factions who showed me the Prisoners’ document draft), he had also gained a role in negotiations around the release of Shalit in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, with Egypt’s mediation and Gerhard Conrad’s, the German facilitator from BND national intelligence. In Gaza, Mohammed Sinwar, Yahya’s brother, is said to be the one who managed Gilat Shalit’s detention.
Sinwar’s power inside the jail was in sum manifest, as he represented the largest segment of Palestinian political prisoners since Hamas detainees (before October 7, 2023) accounted for approximately over a third of the total.
Considered from this perspective, Yahya Sinwar’s rapid rise to the leadership of Hamas in Gaza and the central politburo in the ten years since his release from prison is much more understandable compared to the marginal role he had played before his final conviction and lengthy prison term, not least because of generational issues. Born in 1962 in Khan Younis into a Palestinian refugee family expelled following the 1948 nakba from Majdal (what would later become the Israeli Askelon), a traditional and conservative family, Sinwar had approached Palestinian political Islam and Sheykh Yassin in his early twenties. He attended classes at the Islamic University of Gaza and got a BA in Arabic studies as a student-worker. He was a bricklayer, just as his father was. There, he had met two peers with whom he had been politically active in the Islamic Bloc, the student representation under the Islamist banner, and would later share the leadership of Hamas in Gaza, namely Khalil Hayya and Ismail Haniyeh himself.
However, he did not belong to the Muslim Brotherhood like, in fact, all those who founded Hamas later. He had not had time to build a more relevant role for himself within the organization, not only because of his young age but also because he had been in and out of prison, starting from his first arrest in 1982 up to the arrest that – just six years later – would mark his definitive entry into prison, on the back of a four life sentence on charges of planning the kidnapping and killing of two Israeli soldiers. Sinwar, in short, was not a central figure in a movement that had been formally born only a few months earlier, on 9 December 1987, in a meeting at Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s house in Gaza. However, he had founded in 1986 an armed group, al-Majd, to identify and punish with harshness and cruelty the collaborators Israel had in the Strip, together with Rawhi Mushtaha, another militant who later became a pillar of the military wing of Hamas.
In Yahya Sinwar’s path, that third of life inside a cell has taken on a political role, not an individual one. Prison is a continuation of militancy, though: it is a perspective instrumental in interpreting what the prisoners’ file means for all Palestinians.
The prisoners’ file is an issue that concerns the whole of Palestinian society: one million Palestinians have passed through imprisonment between 1967 and today. And after 7 October, what has happened is the amplification and degeneration of an issue, that of imprisonment, which has now become central due to the allegations of torture, rape, and gross violations of human rights inside, above all, detention camps, now also condensed in a Btselem report. Imprisonment has always been a platform for reaching a consensus far beyond ideological affiliation. It is no coincidence, thus, that the prisoners’ file was indicated as one of the priority goals of the 7 October attack both by Mohammed Deif, the head of the Izzedin al Qassam Brigades and in the official document published by Hamas three months later, in January, entitled Our Narrative.
All the objectives of the 7 October attack, outlined in the document’s sixteen pages, lead out of Gaza anyway.
At first glance, this may seem contradictory, given that news reports and journalistic inquiries so far confirm that it was from Gaza and only from Gaza that the idea and planning for 7 October originated. Yahya Sinwar, head of the Gaza constituency of Hamas, was the mastermind of the 7 October attack in southern Israel in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and 240 were taken hostage.
The prisoners’ file is a matter that addresses the totality of Palestinian society: a platform for reaching a consensus that goes far beyond ideological affiliation. It is no coincidence, therefore, the fact that the prisoners’ file was indicated as one of the prior objectives for the October 7 attack both by Mohammed Deif, the head of the Izzedin al Qassam Brigades, and in the official Document published by Hamas three months later, in January, named ‘Our Narrative.’ All the goals of the October 7 attack, outlined in the Document’s sixteen pages, lead out of Gaza. It may appear a contradiction at first glance, given that all reports so far confirm that Yahya Sinwar, head of the Gaza constituency of Hamas, was the mastermind of the October 7 attack in southern Israel in which 1,200, mostly Israeli civilians, were killed and 240 were taken, hostage. Sinwar planned the attack without informing Hamas leaders abroad, along with a few other members of the Izzedin al-Qassam Brigades, such as Mohammed Deif, Marwan Issa, and his brother Mohammed Sinwar.
Among the objectives indicated by Hamas, there is, in fact, not only the prisoners’ file but the negotiation for another exchange between Israelis and Palestinians that has been going on since 2020 without settling. It had indeed prompted Sinwar to raise the threatening tone in December 2022, during the celebrations of the 35th anniversary of Hamas’ foundation. Together with the prisoners’ file and the West Bank’s dire conditions, Jerusalem is among the objectives. Jerusalem is the insurmountable red line for the national, rather than religious, identity of all Palestinians and their political leaders. It was so for Arafat. It is also so for Sinwar, who among his models, perhaps the most surprising at first sight, has Yasser Arafat himself, often cited in his speeches with the nom de guerre, Abu Ammar. It does not seem coincidental if one combines Arafat’s name with the description of Sinwar as a nationalist, more nationalist than other Hamas leaders. Jerusalem is the symbol of Palestinian national unity for all intents and purposes.
Jerusalem, the red line
The critical turning point for transforming even Jerusalem into an instrument for surpassing the sealed borders of Gaza is undoubtedly the year 2021. In March, Sinwar won, with no minor difficulties, the election to lead the Gaza politburo for the second time. It took three ballots for Sinwar to obtain a majority of votes, confirming with his re-election the nomenklatura that has led Hamas since 2017 after Khaled Meshaal stepped down. Since then, it was Ismail Haniyeh who led the central Hamas politburo, and behind him, Sinwar led with an iron fist and autocratic behaviour in the most critical constituency: Gaza, where Hamas meant political, administrative, and above all, military power and rule. For the first time, the two leading positions inside Hamas included figures from within, from Gaza, who had paradoxically overcome the Gaza embargo and brought the Islamist movement back onto the Palestinian political scene.
In Spring 2021, the general elections for the renewal of the PA parliament (PLC), scheduled to take place on May 22, were just a step away, hence 15 years after the Hamas victory and, shortly afterwards, the rift that still marks the Palestinian division. Hamas registered its list, the only one to contain Jerusalem in its very name. The Islamist movement wanted to profile itself as the guardians of Jerusalem as well as al-Aqsa Mosque, especially at a time when the influence of the right-wing that represents the settlers was already well documented. Naftali Bennett, who has been at the head of the settler movement, was one of the Israeli politicians who embodied the opposition to Netanyahu. Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir were already looming as the new protagonists. The events precipitated by what happened in Jerusalem during the Spring: the Palestinian protest against evictions and freedom of worship during Ramadan, the cancellation of the Palestinian elections decided by President Abu Mazen, and finally, the violent repression of the protests by the Israeli authorities, amid yet another electoral campaign.
Yahya Sinwar wasted no time. He profiled himself as the defender of Jerusalem. On May 10, from Gaza sealed off from the entire world, he launched an ultimatum to Netanyahu to withdraw its troops, police, and settlers from the Haram al-Sharif compound before 6 p.m. As the deadline passed, Hamas fired a barrage of rockets into Israeli territory, even at the periphery of Jerusalem, marking the start of an 11-day Operation called, not by chance, “Sword of Jerusalem.” Despite the high toll of Palestinian civilian casualties from the heavy Israeli shelling, Sinwar proclaimed that the resistance had won and that the 500 km of tunnels had been hit to a minimal extent.
The milirary instrument
The role of the military instrument is thus central to the strategy of Sinwar, which was considered by the negotiators – Egyptian intelligence, first and foremost – to be a flexible, pragmatic politician. He was capable, for instance, of reaching an understanding with a figure considered for many years to be the personification of the Hamas adversary, as was Mohammed Dahlan. After decades apart, their old teenage friendship in Khan Younis had played its part in one of the many attempts in the never-ending Palestinian reconciliation process. Despite this trait contradicting the other radical, violent, inflexible aspects, the history of recent years says only one thing: the military instrument is the constant in Sinwar’s policy.
Since the beginning of his mandate as the head of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar had proposed a ‘national army’ in Gaza that encompassed al-Qassam Brigades and the other military groups, consisting of thousands of fighters. “Our weapons must be under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organisation,” he said publicly, envisioning what he realized soon after. The confirmation has been coming from the very heart of what is called the Unified Resistance Command, which surfaced in the middle of last year, in June 2023, with an interview given to Al Jazeera.net by Ayman Nofal, one of the highest-ranking commanders of the Izzedin al Qassam Brigades, who was killed in October by the Israeli armed forces during the first days of the War on Gaza. It was, therefore, one of the senior commanders who described the objectives and the very functioning of the unified command, in which each faction also had a political contact person. This is the explanation for what happened in 2021: the ultimatum issued by Sinwar resulted from a unified military presence consolidating to the extent that it could take decisions from inside Gaza towards Jerusalem. It was a harbinger of what, in October 2023, would happen in other ways and dimensions.
It was not the first time. “The armed wing has historically been able to exercise varying degrees of influence on the political wing and vice-versa depending on circumstances,” explains Hugh Lovatt, a senior policy fellow with the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “While these dynamics may currently be at the most complicated and fraught, they are not without precedent.”
Sinwar’s appointment as head of the Hamas central politburo thus brings together the two wings, the political and the military, in a single figure. It is also a description of how, in recent years, Hamas has changed, with the confirmation that the Izzedin al Qassam Brigades have also become a sort of fifth constituency. This shadow constituency exerts its influence, especially now, after ten months of the Israeli war on Gaza and an undeclared but de facto ongoing war in the West Bank.
Image: a frame from one of the rare interviews given by Yahya Sinwar to Vice journalist Hind Hassan in 2021