It’s a photo that made history in the Gaza Strip. We see Yahya Sinwar, sitting on a couch in front of his ruined house, destroyed by Israeli forces in 2021. The leader of Hamas in the Palestinian enclave has a smirk on his lips.
These days, that photo – which Yahya Sinwar called “the victory photo” – is resurfacing as Israeli forces announced Thursday that they had once again surrounded the Islamist movement leader’s house in Khan Younes, in southern Gaza. But the most wanted man in the Middle East is not there, the IDF conceded.
The same army also announced a few weeks ago that it had surrounded the underground bunker where the man Israel designates as the main architect of the October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel which left 1,200 dead was hiding. No result.
The hunt continues. “We are going to find Yahya Sinwar and we are going to eliminate him,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said recently, inviting the Palestinians in Gaza to turn against him. “If you get to him before us, it will shorten the war,” he said, testifying to the importance of this capture for Israel, but also to the difficulties encountered.
PHOTO MAHMUD HAMS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE ARCHIVES
Yahya Sinwar, in Gaza, in October 2022
For Israel, by the admission of experts who have made the psychological profile of the Palestinian leader in the past, the current leader of Hamas in Gaza is a real headache, an enemy that the authorities of the Hebrew state have known for a very long time, but who never stopped changing his face.
Yahya Sinwar was born in 1962 in a refugee camp in Khan Younes. His parents, from Ashkelon, a coastal town just north of the Gaza Strip, were among the approximately 700,000 Palestinians uprooted when the state of Israel was established in 1948. During what Palestinians call the “nakba”, the catastrophe.
A graduate of the Islamic University of Gaza, Yahya Sinwar was arrested twice in the 1980s for “Islamist activities”. He was in his twenties when he met the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was fiercely opposed to the existence of Israel. The sheikh’s close attention to the young recruit became evident when he entrusted him with the creation of al-Majd, Hamas’s internal security service responsible for identifying Israel’s “traitors” and informants in within the Palestinian population.
Yahya Sinwar, also known as Abu Ibrahim, carried out this mandate with an intransigence which was quickly noticed and earned him the nickname “Butcher of Khan Younes”.
It is common knowledge that he forced a man to bury his own brother – suspected of collaboration with Israel – alive, making him complete the sordid task with a spoon. He also admitted to strangling another informant with a keffiyeh – the traditional Palestinian headscarf – before burying him.
In 1989, Israeli courts sentenced Yahya Sinwar to four life sentences for the murder of 12 people. The latter took advantage of his time in prison to learn Hebrew, a language he speaks fluently, but also to nourish his legend. “Wherever he was sent [pendant sa peine], he became the leader of all the prisoners because of his dominant personality and his ruthless character,” Ehud Yaari, a former Israeli journalist who is now an analyst at the Washington Institute, said in an interview. He met the Hamas figurehead several times during his incarceration.
In 2011, against all odds, Yahya Sinwar was released from prison. He was one of 1,000 Palestinian prisoners who were exchanged for soldier Gilad Shalit, held for five years by Hamas. His brother Mohammed was part of the negotiating committee.
At the time of his release from prison, he was reassuring during an interview he gave in Hebrew to Israeli television, affirming that he was ready to “support anything that could calm the region”.
A few hours later, he was welcomed as a hero in the Gaza Strip, where he quickly returned to Hamas leadership.
In 2017, he was designated political leader of the Islamist organization in the Palestinian enclave, taking the place of Ismaïl Haniyeh, now the main leader of Hamas in exile in Qatar.
The year 2021 marked a turning point for Yahya Sinwar. That year, after Israeli-Palestinian confrontations at the al-Aqsa mosque and episodes of intercommunal violence, Hamas rained rockets on the Jewish state, which triggered a sharp Israeli military response.
In the wake of the events, the Gazan Islamist leader gave a speech which should have served as a warning to the Israeli authorities. “The multitude of our people will cross the border [entre Gaza et Israël] and will spread like a flood which will uproot the entity [israélienne]. Each of them will take a knife to stab a [Israélien]or will take his car to run over them, or will throw a Molotov cocktail at them that will burn their hearts,” he said.
The similarities between his words and the attacks of October 7 – which Hamas called “Al-Aqsa Flood” – give goosebumps.
In the two years that separated the speech from the nameless killings on Israeli soil, Yahya Sinwar nevertheless lowered his tone during his dealings with the Israeli state, dulling the vigilance of many.
However, his Israeli psychological profilers had sensed the danger in 2021, noting that the man – after taking the photo in front of his pulverized house – presented himself not only as a Palestinian leader, but also as a “spiritual leader” addressing the entire Arab world, ready to defend Jerusalem in the name of Islam.
“This transformation makes him a dangerous, unpredictable figure and we must review the way we act with Hamas in the Gaza Strip,” Israeli security experts told the newspaper on condition of anonymity. Haaretz in 2021.
Today, their analysis seems disastrously premonitory.
With the BBC, the CBC, HaaretzFrontline and the Council of Europe for International Relations
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