After Hamas attacked Israel in October, sparking the war in Gaza, Israeli leaders described the region's top Hamas official, Yahya Sinwar, as a “dead man walking”. Israel considers him the architect of the attack and has portrayed Sinwar's assassination as a key target in a devastating counterattack.
Seven months later, Shinwar's survival symbolizes the failure of Israel's war. Although the Israeli war destroyed much of Gaza, Hamas's top leadership remained largely intact and was unable to release most of the prisoners captured in the October attack.
Despite calling for his death, the Israeli authorities are forced to negotiate with him, albeit indirectly, to free the remaining hostages. Hamas, Israeli and U.S. officials say Mr. Sinwar was not only a strong-willed commander but also a shrewd negotiator who engaged with Israeli envoys at the negotiating table and prevented Israel from winning on the battlefield. He is said to have risen to prominence. Others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss Mr. Shinwar's intelligence assessments and diplomatic negotiations.
Negotiations will be brokered in Egypt and Qatar, but Hamas negotiators will need Mr. Sinwar's consent before agreeing to any concessions, some of the people said — hidden in Gaza's underground network of tunnels. It is believed that–.
Hamas officials maintain that Mr. Sinwar does not have final say over the organization's decisions. However, while Mr. Shinwar technically does not have authority over the Hamas movement as a whole, friends and foes alike believe that his leadership role in Gaza and his strong personality have given him a very strong position in the way Hamas is run. is said to play an important role.
“There is no decision that can be made without consulting Mr. Sinwar,” said Salah al-Din al-Awaudeh, a Hamas member and political analyst who was close to Mr. Sinwar while he was imprisoned in Israel in the 1990s and 2000s. said. “Sinwar is not an ordinary leader, he is a powerful person and an architect of events. He is not like a manager or director, but a leader,” Al Awadeh added.
Unlike other Hamas officials based outside Gaza, including Ismail Haniyeh, the movement's most senior civilian official, Mr. Sinwar has barely been heard from since the start of the war. Although he is nominally Mr. Haniya's junior, U.S. and Israeli officials say Mr. Sinwar is central to Hamas's behind-the-scenes decision to stick to a permanent ceasefire.
Officials and analysts say waiting for Mr. Shinwar's approval often delays negotiations. Israeli airstrikes have damaged much of Gaza's communications infrastructure, and messages to Mr. Sinwar take a day to get through and it takes another day to receive a reply, according to U.S. officials and Hamas members. It is said that this happened sometimes.
For Israeli and Western officials, Mr. Sinwar has been both a brutal adversary and a man capable of analyzing Israeli society and adapting policy accordingly through the course of these negotiations, which stalled again in Cairo last week. He emerged as a skilled political manipulator. .
As the architect of the October 7 attack, Mr. Sinwar masterminded a strategy he knew would provoke a furious Israeli reaction. However, in Hamas' calculations, the deaths of many Palestinian civilians without access to Hamas's underground tunnels were the necessary cost of overturning the status quo with Israel.
U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies have spent months assessing Mr. Shinwar's motives, according to people briefed on the intelligence community. Analysts in both the United States and Israel believe that Mr. Shinwar's main motivation is a desire to take revenge on Israel and weaken it. Intelligence analysts say the welfare of the Palestinian people and the establishment of a Palestinian state are secondary.
Understanding Israeli society
Mr. Shinwar was born in Gaza in 1962 to a family that had fled their homeland along with hundreds of thousands of other Palestinian Arabs who were displaced or forced to flee during the war over the creation of Israel.
Mr. Sinwar joined Hamas in the 1980s. He was later imprisoned for killing Palestinians on charges of apostasy or cooperation with Israel, according to Israeli court records from 1989. Mr. Shinwar, along with more than 1,000 other Palestinians, spent more than 20 years in Israeli custody until his release in 2011. In exchange for an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas. Six years later, Mr. Sinwar was elected leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
While in prison, Mr. Sinwar learned Hebrew and deepened his understanding of Israeli culture and society, according to fellow former inmates and Israeli officials who monitored him in prison. Mr. Sinwar now appears to be using his knowledge to sow division in Israeli society and increase pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to Israeli and US officials.
They believe Mr. Shinwar timed the release of videos of some Israeli hostages to stoke public anger against Mr. Netanyahu at a critical stage in ceasefire negotiations.
Some Israelis want the remaining hostages released, even if it means agreeing to Hamas' demands for a permanent ceasefire that would keep Hamas and Mr. Sinwar in power. But Prime Minister Netanyahu has been reluctant to end the war, partly due to pressure from some of his right-wing allies, who have threatened to resign if the war ends with Hamas intact.
If Prime Minister Netanyahu is accused of prolonging the fighting for personal gain, so is his arch-rival Mr. Sinwar.
Israeli and U.S. intelligence officials say Mr. Shinwar's strategy is to continue the war until it shreds Israel's international reputation and undermines its relationship with its main ally, the United States. With Israel under intense pressure to avoid launching an operation in Rafah, Hamas fired rockets from Rafah into a nearby border post last Sunday, killing four Israeli soldiers.
If this was Hamas's strategy, it appeared to be working. Israel launched an operation near Rafah last week, which prompted President Biden to issue his strongest criticism of Israeli policy since the start of the war. Biden said he would halt some future arms shipments if Israeli forces launch a full-scale invasion of the city's urban center.
Project the Unity image
Hamas and its allies deny that Mr. Sinwar and the movement seek to further exploit Palestinian suffering.
“Hamas' strategy is to stop the war now,” said Ahmed Youssef, a Hamas veteran based in Rafah. “To stop the genocide and murder of Palestinians.”
U.S. officials say Mr. Sinwar despises his colleagues outside Gaza, who were kept in the dark about the exact plan for the October 7 Hamas attack. U.S. officials also believe that Mr. Sinwar is approving military operations by Hamas, despite information from Israeli intelligence. Officers say the extent of his involvement is unclear.
A senior Western official familiar with the ceasefire negotiations said Mr. Sinwar appears to be coordinating decision-making with his brother, Mr. Mohammed, the military leader of Hamas, and has had disagreements with Hamas leaders outside Gaza during the war. I think that may have happened. While outside leaders are sometimes willing to compromise, Mr. Shinwar is less prepared to make concessions to Israeli negotiators, in part because he knows he is likely to be killed whether the war ends or not. said the official. .
Even if negotiators reach a cease-fire agreement, Israel is likely to continue pursuing Mr. Sinwar for the rest of his life, the official said.
Hamas members project an image of unity, downplaying Mr. Sinwar's personal role in decision-making and insisting that Hamas's elected leaders collectively determine the movement's trajectory.
Some say that if Mr. Shinwar played a larger role in the war, it was largely because of his position. As leader of Hamas in Gaza, Sinwar has a greater say, although not the final say, Moussa Abu Marzouk said. , a high-ranking Hamas official based in Qatar.
“Sinwar's opinion is very important because he is on the ground and is leading the movement from within,” said Abu Marzouk, the first leader of Hamas' political office in the 1990s. Ta.
However, Abu Marzouk said Haniya had “the final say” on important decisions, adding that all Hamas political leaders had “one voice”. Haniya could not immediately be reached for comment.
Still, said Al-Awaudeh, a friend from his prison days, there was something extraordinary about Mr. Sinwar's force of personality. Al-Awaudeh said other leaders may not have incited the October 7 attack, preferring to focus on technocratic issues of governance.
“If someone else had been in his position, things might have gone more peacefully,” he said.
Mr. Sinwar himself could not be reached for comment and has been largely unreachable since October. U.S. and Israeli officials said Mr. Sinwar hid near the hostages and used them as human shields. An Israeli hostage freed during the ceasefire in November said he met Mr. Sinwar while in captivity.
In February, the Israeli military released a video purporting to have been taken by soldiers using a security camera found in a Hamas tunnel underground in Gaza. The video showed a man rushing down a tunnel accompanied by a woman and a child.
The military said the man was Shinwar, who is on the run with his family.
It was impossible to verify this claim. The man's face was turned away from the camera.
