He was the architect of the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation against Israel on 7 October 2023, which shook off the image of Israel’s superior security and intelligence capacities. On 17 October, Israel announced that it had eliminated Sinwar, one of its stated objectives when it launched its aggression on Gaza last year.

Yahya Ibrahim Hassan Sinwar was born in the Khan Yunis Refugee Camp in Gaza into a family that had been displaced from Majdal, a Palestinian town that Israel occupied after the Nakba of 1948 and renamed Ashkelon. After completing his primary education in the Khan Yunis Secondary School for Boys, he enrolled in the Islamic University of Gaza, from which he graduated with a BA in Arabic Studies.

Like thousands of other children from the Palestinian refugee camps, Sinwar’s formative years were shaped both by hardship and by the frequent assaults of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) against the camp and its inhabitants.

Sinwar was a prominent political activist during his university years, which helped him acquire the skills and experience that would enable him to rise through the ranks of Hamas after it was founded in 1987 during the First Intifada. Known to be guarded and reticent as a person, he rarely appeared in public. Yet, he had strong leadership skills and exerted a powerful influence over the movement’s members.

Sinwar joined Khaled Al-Hindi and Ruhi Mushtaha in creating a security apparatus called the Organisation of Jihad and Daawah, or Majd. Operating under the supervision of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, its mission was to expose and pursue Israeli Occupation agents. Majd became the nucleus for Hamas’ internal security system.

He was first arrested by Israeli forces in 1982 and placed under administrative detention for four months. He was 20 at the time. A week after his release, he was arrested again and held for six months without trial. In 1985, he was arrested for the third time and sentenced to eight months in prison. On January 20, 1988, he was arrested again. This time he was tried on charges of plotting the abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers and four collaborators with the occupation. He was sentenced to four life terms.

In prison, Sinwar organised Hamas prisoners in Israeli jails and helped organise the hunger strikes in 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004. Because of his role in doing so, he was transferred from one prison to another and forced to spend four years in solitary confinement. He tried and failed to escape from prison twice.

During his 23 years in prison, Sinwar invested much of his time in studying and writing. He taught himself Hebrew in order to better understand the Israeli mentality. He authored and translated several books on various political, military, and literary subjects. He translated two books from Hebrew into Arabic: Shin Bet between the Cracks by Carmi Gillon, a former head of the organisation, and Israeli Political Parties.

In Arabic he wrote Hamas: Trial and Error on the history of the Islamic Resistance Movement, and Al-Majd, an account of Shin Bet’s methods of information gathering, recruiting agents, and interrogation. He also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, The Clove Thorn, about the Palestinian struggle from 1967 to the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

Sinwar was one of the thousand prisoners released in exchange for the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011. The following year, he was elected head of the Hamas Political Bureau, where he coordinated closely with the command of the Izzeddin Al-Qassam Brigades. The efficacy of this was demonstrated during the Israeli aggression against Gaza in 2014.

In 2015, Hamas appointed him to lead the negotiations on Israeli POWs held by the movement. That same year, the US designated him an international terrorist and Israel placed him on its list of assassination targets in Gaza.

On 13 February 2017, Sinwar was elected head of Hamas in Gaza, where he tried to mend relations between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) led by Fatah in the West Bank. He also worked to improve relations with Egypt. His meetings with Egyptian intelligence officers in Cairo in 2017 resulted in agreements on living, security, humanitarian, and border conditions in Gaza.

In March 2021, he was re-elected as head of Hamas in Gaza for a second four-year term. That year, the IOF bombed and destroyed his home for the third time. The other two times were during the Israeli assaults in 2012 and 2014.

After 7 October, Israel moved him to the top of its hit list alongside Mohamed Deif, commander of the Al-Qassam Brigades, and eliminating him became a main objective of the Israeli “Iron Swords” campaign against Gaza.

On 20 May 2024, International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan requested warrants for the arrest of Sinwar, Deif, and then Hamas Political Bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on 7 October. Khan stated that he had requested warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant on the same charges.

On 6 August, a week after the assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran on 31 July, Hamas’ Shura Council elected Sinwar as its new Political Bureau chief. On 18 October, Hamas officially confirmed that the IOF had killed Sinwar. In its statement, corroborated by video footage, Hamas reported that he had died while fighting IOF soldiers and that his martyrdom would only strengthen the Resistance Movement.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 24 October, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly