Palestinian-Israeli conflict

He is feared and identified in his home in Gaza, and Israelis greatly despise him.

The head of the Hamas political bureau, Yahya Sinwar, became a sworn enemy of the Jewish state.

The Israeli army refers to him as “a dead man walking.” Al-Sanwar, who was educated at the university, always outwitted his enemies.

Israeli journalist Ehud Yaari interviewed Sinwar 4 times during the 22 years Sinwar spent in prison, and says that “Sinwar is a scary man.”

Sinwar was convicted of killing two Israelis and four suspected Palestinian informants.

He also runs Hamas’s dreaded internal intelligence service. Even inside the prison, he reportedly continued to violently harass colleagues.

Sinwar’s release in 2011 was a turning point: not only did it allow him to quickly rise to the highest political position in Hamas in Gaza by 2017, it seems to have planted the seeds of October 7.

His freedom came with more than a thousand other Palestinian prisoners in exchange for just one Israeli army soldier, Gilad Shalit, who had been captured five years earlier.

Sinwar described the process of exchanging his freedom as “one of the major strategic milestones in the history of our cause.”

His purpose was to reverse the establishment of Israel in 1948, as Sinwar was born 14 years later, in a refugee camp in Khan Yunis, the second largest city in Gaza.

He joined Hamas a few decades later, and was a rising star even before prison.

It was important enough that Israel saved him from a brain tumor while he was in prison.

Once he was the head of Hamas in Gaza, he spread the idea that his positions against Israel were getting worse. In 2018, he told an Israeli journalist that he saw “an opportunity for change.”

Sinwar’s general message to the Palestinians has not changed: the destruction of Israel.

In the next round of hostilities in 2021, the IDF apparently doubted Israel’s previous medical generosity, so they bombed Sinwar’s home.

A week after the truce, Sinwar boldly gave the Israeli army a second chance. He said in a rare press conference that he would return home on foot, challenging them to kill him as he walked the streets.

After he returned home safely, his deception continued until October 7, when Sinwar and the Hamas military leadership revealed their true strategy to the world with a deadly attack and the capture of hundreds of hostages.