Israel had been hunting Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar for more than a year, known to be the mastermind of the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel. But on Thursday, Israel confirmed his killing in what it said was a gunfight in Rafah.
In this article, Al Majalla details the life of one of Israel's most wanted men.
When Israel agreed to a complex prisoner swap in 2011 for the release of its soldier Gilad Shalit, it could not have known that one of the Palestinians exchanged would become the leader of Hamas and the mastermind of the October 7 attacks 12 years later.
Yahya Sinwar was brought out of Israeli custody under the terms of “the Faithful to the Free” deal. He was one of 1,027 prisoners exchanged for Shalit. The Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing, captured Shalit in 2006 in an advanced military mission run with the Nasser Salah al-Din Brigades, affiliated with the Popular Resistance Committees and the Army of Islam.
Known as Operation Fading Illusion, it was among the largest and most complex carried out by Palestinian factions since the start of the Second Intifada, or uprising, which began in 2000.
The Al-Qassam Brigades held Shalit hostage for five years in secret, while Israeli intelligence agencies failed to locate him, even during a fierce, 21-day find-and-rescue operation, which ran between 2008 and 2009. Two years later, Israel was compelled to negotiate the prisoner swap deal, which freed Sinwar. The events in motion led to the biggest strike against the country since 1973.
Refugee in Khan Younis
Yahya Sinwar's family come from the city of Majdal, which is now within Israel and known as Ashkelon. It has been occupied since the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, which imposed the Israeli state on two-thirds of Palestine. As a result, Sinwar's family was displaced to the Khan Yunis refugee camp, where he was born in 1962. He grew up under difficult circumstances. The hardships of the camp worsened in 1967, when Israel completed its occupation of the rest of Palestine, taking the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The standard of living in the camp became even bleaker as economic conditions declined, curfews intensified, and military attacks intensified. Sinwar remained a child in Khan Yunis throughout. His experiences there helped form his political and military consciousness. After completing school, he enrolled at the Islamic University of Gaza to study the Arabic language.
University activism
He joined its Islamic Bloc during his university years, eventually becoming its leader. It was the student branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. This period and experience were pivotal in Sinwar's life, helping him assume leadership roles later within Hamas.
Although he was not part of the movement's initial founding leadership, he significantly shaped the principles and direction of the Islamic resistance from his university days. Sinwar's political activism began in the early 1980s. He became one of the pioneering figures in various forms of Palestinian leadership and resistance. He believed in the necessity of eliminating all of the tools used by the occupiers as a precursor to defeating it – focusing in particular on collaborators and agents – which he considered the most dangerous and prominent threat to the Palestinian cause.
