Terrorist Yahya Sinwar was named the new leader of the Palestinian group Hamas on Tuesday after its previous boss, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in an attack in Tehran, Iran, on July 31. Sinwar rose even further within the terrorist militia, reaching the highest rank in the group after a long journey that led him to be the mastermind behind the massacre of October 7.
Sinwar began his journey with the terrorist group decades ago, becoming one of Israel’s main targets over time. Aged 61, he grew up in the southern Gaza Strip town of Khan Younis. He shared a relationship with other senior members of the militia, including Mohammed Deif, who became Hamas’ military chief.
In the 1980s, Sinwar launched two projects that soon became his obsessions. The first was arming the terrorist group, and the second was identifying potential Israeli collaborators.
His first assignment within Hamas was to lead the “Forces of Glory,” a unit that dealt with traitors, earning him a reputation for cruelty and spreading terror within the enclave. He then became the mentor of the Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, which participated in important attacks, such as the one on October 7.
The nickname “The Butcher of Khan Younis” is not for nothing; Sinwar is accused of a myriad of crimes and offenses, including being convicted of murdering 12 Palestinians for political reasons and even religious interpretations of the Koran that deviated from his own.
All of these actions led to his arrest on three occasions; the first was in 1982, when he spent four months in Israeli administrative detention. However, the worst of his fate would come in 1988, when he was sentenced to four life sentences, although he served just over two decades of the total time.
During his time behind bars, the terrorist remained active both within Hamas and on a personal level. He took the opportunity to study Hebrew and gain insight into his enemy’s logic and thinking, and he managed to recruit new Palestinians to join Hamas, where he still maintained his influence.
The orders he gave within the group were conveyed through a network he had set up, which included his lawyers, members of the International Red Cross, and even some infidels in the Israeli Parliament.
Thanks to this, he achieved his first approach to the Iranian regime, which leads a large part of the terrorist militias in the Middle East, including the Palestinian one.
Many believed that Sinwar’s own victims had saved him in 2004 when, while incarcerated, he underwent a successful brain tumor operation in an Israeli hospital.
Seven years later, in 2011, the terrorist gained his freedom thanks to a prisoner exchange that many Palestinians dubbed “Loyalty of the Free,” which included more than a thousand Fatah and Hamas fighters for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been held hostage by the terrorists for years.
After regaining his freedom, Sinwar returned to his leadership position within Hamas and became its chief inside the Strip on February 13, 2017, when Haniyeh was appointed political leader and moved to Qatar.
Michael Koubi, a former Shin Bet officer who spoke to media, explained that Sinwar’s motivation in this terrorist fight against the Jewish state is religious and is based on his incorrect interpretation of the Koran. “He does not see the problem with Israel as something limited to land or a political conflict, but rather a religious war.” “And, to do so, he convinced the 30,000 Hamas members to see the conflict as he sees it,” he explained.
Koubi, who spent hundreds of hours interrogating him, even said that he is “a merciless barbarian, a religious fanatic—to an extraordinary extent—with a great hatred of Jews,” adding, “He carries death in his eyes.”
Both Israel and the United States are seeking him for his crimes and have placed him among the priorities of their operations, while the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against him and other terrorists in May of this year for crimes against humanity and war crimes.
For its part, after the outbreak of the conflict in October, Tel Aviv promised to find him—since he is believed to be hiding in the enclave’s extensive network of tunnels—and kill him. “He is a dead man walking,” they said.
