He is the number one enemy of the Hebrew state. Already a leader The movement’s leader in the Gaza Strip since 2017, Yahya Sinouar was elected by the Hamas leadership on Tuesday, August 6, to head the political bureau to succeed Ismail Haniyeh, killed in Tehran (Iran) in a strike attributed to Israel. Franceinfo returns to the profile of the new leader of the Palestinian armed group, who has not been found since the terrorist attack of October 7, 2023.
Considered the mastermind of the October 7 attack
Before being elected head of Hamas’ political bureau, Yahya Sinouar, 61, had been the leader of the Hamas of the Palestinian Islamist movement in Gaza. He is presented by Israel as the sponsor of the massacres of October 7, 2023, carried out by Hamas commandos, which left more than 1,200 dead in Israel. “It’s his strategy, he’s the one who set up the operation,” probably for a year or two, Leïla Seurat of the Arab Center for Research and Political Studies (Carep) in Paris told AFP.
“Yahya Sinouar is the commander… and he is a dead man,” Israeli Defense Forces spokesman Daniel Hagari had hammered home the day after the attack, according to The Times of Israel. “We will find Sinouar and eliminate him!”hammered home the Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, on November 4.
Nicknamed the “butcher of Khan Younes”
Yahya Sinouar was born in 1962 in the Khan Younis refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip, which was at the time under Egyptian administration. Originally from Ashkelon, his parents had come to Khan Younis as refugees after the Nakba, the forced exile of hundreds of thousands of people following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
He joined Hamas shortly after its founding in 1987, during the first intifada in a refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip. A year later, he participated in the founding of Majd, Hamas’ internal security service, reports the European Council on Foreign Relations.
At 25, he heads the Hamas intelligence unit that punishes “collaborators”, These Palestinians punished for intelligence with the Israeli enemy. His various actions within the terrorist movement earned him the nickname “butcher of Khan Younes”.
At this time, he gained the trust of the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and the two men become “very, very close”Kobi Michael, a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, told the BBC.
He spent part of his life in Israeli prisons
Yahya Sinouar was imprisoned in 1988 and was not released until 2011. During his twenty-three-year incarceration, the prisoner established himself as a leader of the prisoners. “In prison, he took the opportunity to study Israeli society and learn Hebrew. Over the years, he acquired a certain reputation among Palestinian prisoners, who referred to him as one of their representatives,” explains for France Culture the cartographer Delphine Papin, author of a “cartographic comic strip” which traces his trajectory.
In excerpts from his interrogations published by Israeli media, he recounts in particular having kidnapped a traitor, taken to the cemetery of Khan Younès: “I put him in a grave and strangled him with a keffiyeh (…). I was sure he knew he deserved to die.”
In 2004, he suffered a stroke in prison and survived thanks to the help of an Israeli dentist whose testimony was collected by franceinfo. He was finally released in 2011 with more than a thousand prisoners freed by Israel, in exchange for soldier Gilad Shalit, then a Hamas hostage. Yahya Sinouar joined Hamas’ political bureau in the Gaza Strip and handled liaison with the al-Qassam Brigades, the movement’s armed wing.
An invisible man for over a year
Yahya Sinouar has not appeared in public for almost a year. The Israeli army claims to have filmed it in a tunnel in the Gaza Strip on October 10, 2023, three days after the bloody attacks targeting Israel. “His whereabouts are unknown; he blends in with the population and is well-versed in subversion methods. He eludes Israeli intelligence.”summarizes to franceinfo MYriam Benraad, professor of international relations at Schiller University.
:quality(50)/2024/08/07/000-34j938l-66b340ad38e05883636472.jpg)
According to the newspaper information The worldthe Israeli army suspected, the day after the attack of October 7, his presence in the tunnels of the Gaza Strip in the company of his brother Mohammed Sinouar, head of Hamas in Khan Younès.
The one who is now “the face of the devil” where the “death on borrowed time”in the words of the Israeli armynne, is a real target to be taken down for the Hebrew State. Even before his appointment as head of Hamas, the Israeli army was already proposing “money to reveal where Sinwar was hiding and where the tunnels were,” said Mahmoud al-Zaanine, one of the Gazans who testified to AFP about being tortured by Israeli forces.
The recent appointment of Yahya Sinouar “is an additional reason to eliminate it quickly and wipe this despicable organization off the map“, considered a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel, according to Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz.
The representative of a “hard line”
He is presented as a leader “charismatic” And “cruel” by the various interlocutors contacted on the subject. “I have never known anyone as cruel as Yahya Sinouar,” a former Israeli secret serviceman told Radio France’s correspondent in Jerusalem. The man who repeatedly questioned the Palestinian in prison remembers a “intelligent, lively and charismatic man but [qui] had no feelings”. “He spoke with coldness and indifference, nothing touched him,” he remembers.
“Yahya Sinouar has charisma and influence over the entire movement [du Hamas]“, analyses political scientist Myriam Benraad. A strong personality with control over the movement, which risks complicating any possible attempt at negotiations. “with the other leaders [du Hamas] more moderate”, continues the researcher. This appointment can thus be seen “as a message of defiance.” She “very clearly reflects the militarization of this conflict; we are on a hard line from Hamas,” she adds.
On the political level, Yahya Sinouar, placed on the American list of “international terrorists” since 2015, recalls The Orient-The Dayadvocates a united Palestinian leadership for all the Occupied Territories: the Gaza Strip, held by Hamas, the West Bank, administered by Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah, and East Jerusalem. “He said he would punish anyone who tried to hinder reconciliation with Fatah,” recalls the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Yahya Sinouar is also close to Iran. In a speech given in 2021 and echoed by the BBC, the Palestinian expressed his gratitude for Iranian support, including military and financial, for the movement: “If it had not been for Iran, the resistance in Palestine would not have had the means it has today,” he declared.