The Israeli military says it is investigating whether its forces in the Gaza Strip have killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, a chief architect of the 7 October 2023 attack on Israel and the country’s most wanted man.
Sinwar – who has striking snow-white hair and jet-black eyebrows – disappeared at the start of the war sparked by the attack, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.
That was hardly surprising, as thousands of Israeli troops backed by drones, electronic eavesdropping devices and human informants, tried to discover his whereabouts.
Sinwar, 61, widely known as Abu Ibrahim, was born in the Khan Younis refugee camp at the southern end of the Gaza Strip.
His parents were from Ashkelon but became refugees after what Palestinians call “al-Naqba” (the Catastrophe) – the mass displacement of Palestinians from their ancestral homes in Palestine in the war that followed Israel’s founding in 1948.
He was educated at Khan Younis Secondary School for Boys and then graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Arabic language from the Islamic University of Gaza.
At that time, Khan Younis was a “bastion” of support for the Muslim Brotherhood, says Ehud Yaari, a fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who interviewed Sinwar in prison four times.
The Islamist group “was a massive movement for young people going to the mosques in the poverty of the refugee camp”, Yaari says, and it would later take on similar importance for Hamas.
Sinwar was first arrested by Israel in 1982, aged 19, for “Islamic activities” and then arrested again in 1985. Around this time, he won the confidence of Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
Two years after Hamas was founded in 1987, he set up the group’s feared internal security organization, the al-Majd. He was still only 25.
Al-Majd became infamous for punishing those accused of so-called morality offenses – Michael says he targeted shops that stocked “sex videos” – as well as hunting down and killing anyone suspected of collaborating with Israel
Sinwar has spent a large part of his adult life – over 22 years – in Israeli prisons, from 1988 to 2011. His time there, some of it in solitary confinement, appears to have radicalized him even further.
In 2013, he was elected a member of Hamas’s Political Bureau in the Gaza Strip, before becoming its head in 2017.
Sinwar’s younger brother Mohammed also went on to play an active role in Hamas. He claimed to have survived several Israeli assassination attempts before being pronounced dead by Hamas in 2014. Media reports have since surfaced asserting he may still be alive, active in Hamas’s military wing hiding in tunnels beneath Gaza, and may even have played a part in the 7 October attacks.
