Yahya Sinwar

Yahya Sinwar (1962-2024) was the head of Hamas in Gaza and, from August 2024 until his death two months later, the overall leader of the movement; Israeli and American officials identify him as the principal architect of the 7 October 2023 attack, the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust. He spent more than two decades in Israeli prisons for murder before his release in a 2011 prisoner exchange, and he used the following twelve years to plan the war that killed him.

Who he was, and where he came from

Sinwar was born in 1962 in the Khan Younis refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, to a family displaced from the town of al-Majdal (today Ashkelon) in the 1948 war. He studied Arabic literature at the Islamic University of Gaza and joined the Muslim Brotherhood’s Gaza networks as a young man, becoming one of the founding members of Hamas when it formed in 1987 out of the Brotherhood’s Gaza branch at the start of the First Intifada.

The enforcer in prison

Inside the new organization, Sinwar founded and ran a security apparatus known as al-Majd in 1985, whose job was hunting down Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel and enforcing Hamas’s moral code inside Gaza; it built him a reputation as one of the movement’s most feared internal enforcers, long before he became known outside Gaza. Israel arrested him in 1988 and convicted him of orchestrating the murders of Palestinians accused of collaboration and of involvement in the killing of two Israeli soldiers; he was sentenced to four life terms.

He spent the next twenty-three years, 1988 to 2011, in Israeli prisons. He used them methodically: he learned fluent Hebrew, read Israeli newspapers and books on Israeli politics and society, and became the de facto leader of the Hamas prison bloc, running its internal discipline and its dealings with Israeli authorities. Israeli doctors removed a brain abscess from him in 2004, an operation credited with saving his life. That same year he wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, published in Arabic as The Thorn and the Carnation, dramatizing the rise of the Islamist movement in Gaza; it stands as one of the few extended pieces of his own writing on the record. Some Israeli officials who studied him in this period read his fluency in Hebrew and his command of Israeli affairs as a sign he understood Israel too well to want open war with it. October 7 proved that judgment wrong.

Release and the road to power

Israel freed Sinwar on 18 October 2011, one of roughly 1,027 Palestinian prisoners exchanged for a single captured Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who had been held in Gaza since 2006. Back in Gaza, Sinwar rebuilt his standing inside Hamas’s military wing and its relationship with the movement’s political bureau. In February 2017 Hamas’s Gaza membership elected him head of its political bureau in the Strip, succeeding Ismail Haniyeh; he was re-elected to a second term in March 2021. From that post he worked with military commander Mohammed Deif to plan the operation that would define his legacy, while Hamas’s public messaging, including its 2017 policy document, continued to present the movement in softer language for foreign audiences than the movement’s founding 1988 charter had used.

The war he built

Sinwar is identified by Israeli, American and other Western intelligence services as the chief architect, alongside Deif, of the 7 October 2023 assault: the coordinated invasion of southern Israel that killed roughly 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took some 251 hostages into Gaza. Israeli intelligence had obtained a detailed version of the attack plan, internally called “Jericho Wall,” more than a year before it was carried out and did not act on it. In communications later obtained by Israeli and Western intelligence, Sinwar is reported to have described Gaza’s mounting civilian death toll during the war not as a cost to be minimized but as useful to Hamas, telling associates that the images of Palestinian suffering would turn international opinion against Israel. He directed the war from Gaza’s tunnel network, reportedly keeping Israeli hostages near him as protection against Israeli strikes.

After an Israeli strike killed Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on 31 July 2024, Hamas named Sinwar the movement’s overall leader on 6 August 2024, uniting its political and military leadership in one figure for the first time in years.

Death in Rafah

Israeli forces killed Sinwar in Gaza in mid-October 2024, in a firefight rather than a planned strike; Israel confirmed his death on 17 October 2024, after identifying his body. He had led the whole of Hamas for barely two months. His death did not end the war he started, and Hamas named a collective leadership rather than a single successor in the months that followed. See who attacked first on October 7 for the record of the attack he built his career toward.

The myths and the legacy

Hamas’s own messaging and its sympathizers cast Sinwar after his death as a martyred resistance leader who died fighting rather than fleeing, a framing built to overshadow the fact that he spent the war’s final months hiding in tunnels beneath civilians while ordering others to fight and die above him. A separate, softer myth circulated in Western commentary before 2023: that his years in an Israeli prison and his fluency in Hebrew had made him a pragmatist who understood Israel too well to risk a war he could not win. That theory was Sinwar’s biggest asset in the run-up to October 7, and the attack itself was its refutation. The honest record is simpler than either myth: a man convicted of murder at twenty-six who spent two decades studying his enemy in prison, was freed in an exchange meant as a humanitarian gesture, and used his freedom to plan the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust.

Mohammed Deif · Ismail Haniyeh · October 7 attacks · The Hamas Covenant, 1988 · The Hamas 2017 document · Who attacked first, every war