The death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar on Thursday closes the books on one of the most depraved and evil careers in the history of terrorism.
Sinwar’s crimes against both Israelis and Palestinians were legion, and Hamas may find the people of Gaza are not anxious to lionize him as a martyred hero.
Sinwar was born in a Gaza refugee camp in 1962 and joined Hamas soon after it was founded in 1987. His family was living in a refugee camp because it was displaced from the region now called Ashkelon by the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which was started by the former and decisively won by the latter.
Sinwar was radicalized during his university days by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, co-founder of Hamas and “spiritual leader” of the organization. Yassin’s religious and political ideology fused the Islamic supremacism of the Muslim Brotherhood with the bitter resentments of the Palestinians. As the Hamas manifesto puts it: “There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except through jihad.”
Sinwar spent much of his career in charge of the Majd, the “internal security” for Hamas, which meant he ordered the torture and killing of Palestinians who “collaborated” with Israel. He became known as the “Butcher of Khan Younis” for murdering Palestinians, not Israelis. In one especially notorious case, he murdered a suspect by strangling the man with his own keffiyeh scarf and burying him alive.
Sinwar admitted to torturing and killing 12 suspected Palestinian collaborators after Israeli security forces arrested him in 1988.
These killings, along with the murder of two Israeli soldiers, earned Sinwar four life sentences in Israeli prisons. He learned Hebrew and studied Israeli society while in prison, and even wrote an autobiographical novel called Thorns and Carnations, but his was not a journey of understanding or compassion.
Sinwar showed no detectable gratitude toward Israel when its doctors rescued him from brain cancer in 2008. In fact, Hamas later kidnapped the nephew of one of the doctors who operated on Sinwar. The doctor personally pleaded with Sinwar to release the hostage. His nephew was murdered by Hamas the next day.
Sinwar only survived the brain tumor because it was detected by a prison dentist named Yuval Bitton, who ordered him rushed to the hospital for surgery. Sinwar later thanked Bitton for saving his life, but then added: “Now you’re strong, you have 200 atomic warheads. But we’ll see, maybe in another 10 to 20 years you’ll weaken, and I’ll attack.”
Sinwar wound up spending only 22 years of his four life terms in jail, as he was released in a famous prisoner exchange by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2011. Sinwar was among the 1,027 Palestinian prisoners traded for a kidnapped Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit, who had been held captive by Hamas for five years in defiance of international law.
Sinwar’s brother Muhammad was a mastermind of the operation that captured Shalit. Some Israeli civilians kidnapped during the October 7 attack in 2023 have reported that Hamas still keeps pictures of Shalit hanging on the walls of its hostage dungeons.
Soon after his release, Sinwar got married and resumed his activities with Hamas, working in its “political wing” for a while before once again taking charge of purging political enemies and arresting collaborators.
In 2016, Sinwar was apparently behind the execution of Hamas military commander Mahmoud Rushdi Ishtewi. Istewi was supposedly arrested for “financial, ethical, and security lapses,” but it looks a lot more like he played the game of thrones and lost. Istewi was able to get a letter to his family stating that he was constantly tortured during three weeks of captivity before he was executed without trial.
Ishtewi’s death paved the way for Sinwar’s rise to power. He was elected head of the Hamas political bureau in Gaza in 2017, and re-elected to that post in 2021.
After a previous war between Israel and Hamas ended in 2021, Sinwar gave a televised news conference in which he dared the Israelis to assassinate him.
“When I am done here, I will be walking for most of my journey home. I will wrap this up in 10 minutes and it will take me another 10 minutes to get ready to leave, then I will walk for 20 or 30 minutes. That’s nearly one hour or 3,600 seconds; enough for Israel to weaponize an aircraft and launch it. Yet I will not bat an eyelid,” he taunted.
About a year before the October 7 atrocity, Sinwar became notably more militant, giving speeches in which he urged Hamas to prepare for “war” and warning Israel it would soon face a devastating “flood.” The official Hamas name for the October 7 attack was “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.”
Israeli security officials say Sinwar plotted the October 7 attack along with Mohammed Deif, commander of the “military wing” of Hamas. Deif was reportedly killed by an Israeli airstrike on Gaza in July, although Hamas insists he is still alive and in hiding. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has been trying to confirm Deif’s status because it has pending arrest warrants against him for crimes against humanity.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in September unsealed terrorism, murder, conspiracy, and sanctions evasion charges against Sinwar.
“The Justice Department has charged Yahya Sinwar and other senior leaders of Hamas for financing, directing, and overseeing a decades-long campaign to murder American citizens and endanger the national security of the United States,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said when the charges were announced.
Garland noted that over 40 Americans were among the victims of the October 7 massacre orchestrated by Sinwar.
Sinwar might be responsible for the deaths of more Palestinians than anyone in the modern era, given both the murders by his hand, and the thousands who have died in the war he started. When some other Hamas leaders balked at the casualties in Gaza, Sinwar wrote them a letter explaining that dead Palestinian civilians were “necessary sacrifices” whose demise would “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honor.”
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