Who was Yahya Sinwar? – The Hindu

Top Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the chief architect of the Hamas attack on Israel, on October 7, 2023. Photo Credit: AP

immediately after Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023In which about 1,200 people were killed, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said Yahya SinwarThe leader of the Islamic terrorist group in Gaza and the main architect of the attack. “A Dead Man Walking”. after a year, after that More than 42,000 Palestinians killedMost of them are women and children, and the IDF, which has reduced much of Gaza to rubble, announced on Thursday (October 17, 2024) that it had killed its most wanted man in an operation. from Gaza Rafa.

Also read: Israel’s Foreign Minister confirms that top Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was killed in Gaza

Born in a refugee camp in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza in 1962, fourteen years after the creation of the State of Israel, Sinwar grew up under foreign occupation – first Egyptian and then Israeli. His parents were from al-Majdal, a city north of Gaza, today known as Ashkelon in Israel, from which they were forced to flee what became the State of Israel in 1948. Approximately 700,000 Palestinians were made refugees between 1948–49. what they call Nakba (Doomsday). Sinwar fled south towards Gaza.

in israeli prison

Sinwar became active in the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s and was first arrested by Israel in 1982, when he was 19 years old. When Hamas was founded in 1987, Sinwar founded the group’s internal security organization, al-Majd, which was accused of targeting many Palestinians. “For cooperation” with Israel. Sinwar was a ruthless enforcer of loyalty. In 1988, he was arrested by the Israelis, convicted of murdering 12 Palestinians and sentenced to four life terms. He spent 22 years in Israeli prisons. But prison never broke him. He once told a Shin Bet interrogator, “You know that one day you will be the one under interrogation, and I will be standing here as the interrogator, on behalf of the government.”

A fluent Hebrew speaker, Sinwar was motivated by his deep dislike of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and a deep commitment to the Islamic ideology of Hamas. For him, Israeli prison was a learning “academy”. He said that he had “married for the Palestinian cause”. And violence defined his method, right from the days when he was hunting “collaborators”.

Sinwar was released in 2011 as part of a prisoner swap deal when Israel freed 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Gilad Shalit, a soldier who had been captured by Hamas in 2006. By that time, Hamas was already in power in Gaza, and Ismail Haniyeh was its leader. As a former internal security chief who spent two decades in Israeli prisons, Sinwar already enjoyed a cult status among Hamas’s top ranks. He rose rapidly within the militant group, and established close ties with Haniyeh and Hezbollah and Hamas’s foreign supporters, including Iran. In 2012, Sinwar traveled to Iran to meet Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated by the US in January 2020 in Baghdad.

ruler of gaza

In 2017, when Haniyeh became the head of the Politburo of Hamas. Sinwar was selected as the group’s leader in Gaza. A year later, in an interview, Sinwar said that his life as administrator of Gaza, which had been under Israeli blockade since 2007, was no different from his time spent in Israeli prisons. “I have only changed jails. And, despite all that, the old one was much better than this one. I had water, electricity. I had a lot of books. Gaza is very tough,” he said. This was the time when Hamas showed signs of restraint. This had stopped the suicide bombings. Its updated 2017 charter removed anti-Semitic comments from its original charter. The Hamas leadership also indicated that they would accept the 1967 borders as part of a long-term ceasefire with Israel.

But in the years to come, Sinwar would see the Palestinian issue pushed to a corner of West Asia. There were no negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis. Hamas took control of blockaded Gaza, while Israel continued to deepen its occupation of the West Bank. The settler political class in Israel began to push for annexation of West Bank settlements. Four Arab countries, including the United Arab Emirates, will normalize ties with Israel in 2020 under a deal brokered by the US Saudi Arabia, custodian of Islam’s two holiest mosques, was in the advanced stages of recognizing the state of Israel.

October 7 attack

Sinwar’s response to the ongoing changes in the region was to launch a deadly attack inside Israel. From his point of view the attack was an immediate success – his forces took the Israelis by surprise. Noted Israeli intelligence agencies failed to detect Sinwar’s move. Hamas terrorists spread violence in Israeli towns for hours. The political leadership was taken by surprise. But Sinwar probably misjudged the Israeli response. He and millions of Palestinians paid a heavy price for their actions.

Most of the victims of the Hamas attack, which shocked the country, were Israeli civilians. The brutality of the attack further isolated Hamas, while Israel consolidated support among its allies, including US President Joe Biden, under whose watch the attack launched a retaliatory war on Palestinians in Gaza. In which most of the areas were destroyed. Israel has repeatedly resisted calls for a ceasefire, despite large numbers of civilian casualties in Gaza. In the last year he killed many of his enemies. Mohammad Deif, the head of Hamas’s military wing, was assassinated on 13 July. Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran on 31 July. On September 27, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in the Beirut bombing and now Sinwar was also killed.

What remains to be seen is whether these killings will provide Israel with long-term security or whether the wounds of the wars Israel is fighting will continue to trap the Jewish state in a cycle of violence.