Hamas on Tuesday named Yahya Sinwar, considered the mastermind behind the October 7 attack on Israel, as its new political leader.
Sinwar, who will be in charge of the Gaza Strip, replaces Ismail Haniyakilled in Iran last week in an attack blamed on Israel.
“The Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas announces the selection of leader Yahya Sinwar as head of the movement’s political bureau“the group said in a statement cited by AFP.
Minutes after the announcement, Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, said it had fired a volley of rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israeli soil.
Israeli military and officials accuse Sinwar of being one of the masterminds behind the October 7 attackmaking him one of the most wanted militants in the country.
His appointment as the new Hamas chief comes less than a week after Haniya was killed in Tehran. Iran and Hamas blame Israel for the killing, while Israel has refused to comment on the incident.
The Hamas attack on October 7 left 1,198 people dead, mostly civilians, according to official Israeli figures.
During the attack, the militants also captured 251 people, 111 of whom are still held captive in Gaza.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign against Gaza has killed at least 39,653 people, according to the Hamas-ruled territory’s health ministry, which does not provide details on civilian and militant deaths.
The beginnings
Sinwar, 61 – widely known as Abu Ibrahim – Born in Khan Younis refugee camp, in the far south of the Gaza Strip.
His parents were from Ashkelon but became refugees after the event Palestinians call “al-Naqba” (the Catastrophe) or the mass displacement of Palestinians from their ancestral homes in the war that followed the founding of Israel in 1948.
He was educated at Khan Younis Boys Secondary School and later graduated with a BA in Arabic from the Islamic University of Gaza.
Sinwar has been arrested three times, the first time in 1982, at the age of 19, for “Islamic activities” and then arrested again in 1985. It was around this time that He gained the trust of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
Two years after Hamas was founded in 1987, Sinwar created the group’s feared internal security organization, Al-Majd, at just 25 years old.
The Al-Majd faction became famous for punishing people for so-called crimes against morality (according to some analysts, one of its targets was shops selling “sex videos”), as well as for hunting down and killing anyone suspected of collaborating with Israel.
A life in prison
Sinwar has spent much of his adult life (over 22 years) in Israeli prisons. He was held from 1988 to 2011..
His time there, much of it in solitary confinement, appears to have radicalised him further.
He positioned himself as a leader among the prisoners, negotiating on their behalf with prison authorities and enforcing discipline among them.
An Israeli government assessment of Sinwar during his time in prison described his character as “cruel, authoritarian, influential and with unusual endurance skills, cunning and manipulative, content with little… He keeps secrets even inside the prison, among other prisoners… He has the ability to draw crowds.”
While in prison, Sinwar learned to speak Hebrew fluently and read Israeli newspapers.
He was released from prison in 2011 as part of a deal in which 1,027 Palestinian and Israeli Arab prisoners were released in exchange for a single Israeli hostage.IDF soldier Gilad Shalit.
Shalit had been held captive for five years after being kidnapped by, among others, Sinwar’s brother, a senior Hamas military commander.
Sinwar has since called for more kidnappings of Israeli soldiers.
A heavy-handed regime
In 2013, Sinwar was elected to the Hamas Political Bureau in the Gaza Strip, before becoming its head in 2017.
Sinwar’s reputation for cruelty and violence earned him the nickname “The Butcher” of Khan Younis.
In September 2015, the United States added his name to its list of “international terrorists.”
He is credited with the 2015 arrest, torture and murder of a Hamas commander named Mahmoud Ishtiwi, accused of embezzlement and homosexuality.
In 2018, at an international media briefing, Sinwar expressed support for thousands of Palestinians breaking through the border fence separating the Gaza Strip from Israel as part of protests against the US relocation of its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Later that year, he claimed to have survived an assassination attempt by Palestinians loyal to the rival Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank.
However, he has also shown periods of pragmatism, supporting temporary ceasefires with Israel, prisoner exchanges and a reconciliation with the Palestinian Authority.
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