Who is Yahya Sinwar? The mastermind of October 7, Israel thinks it has finally killed

Yahya Sinwar, the world’s most wanted terrorist, spent years in Israeli prisons before rising to the top of Hamas and plotting the October 7 massacre.

He was born in the Khan Younis refugee camp in 1962 and led an impoverished childhood dependent on aid from the United Nations.

After a stint at the Islamic University of Gaza for Arabic studies, he embraced militancy against Israel, although his career as a budding warrior almost ended at age 26 – when he accidentally detonated a bomb he was making.

He soon ended up in an Israeli prison in the southern city of Ashkelon, near the Gaza border, where Israeli interrogators discovered he was behind the murders of four Palestinians who had worked as informants for Israel. They called him the ‘Butcher of Khan Younis’, a name that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

In 1989, he was sentenced to four life sentences, with Israeli news reports on his case saying he convinced a Hamas member to expose his own brother as an informant before burying him alive.

He subsequently spent twenty years in Israeli custody, where he built a close circle of friends and fellow militants. He also smuggled cellphones into the prison and conducted background checks on new prisoners to ensure they were not spies for Israel.

Even during that early period, his Israeli jailers regarded him as a formidable Palestinian figure, who learned to speak fluent Hebrew and took a keen interest in Israeli politics and culture.

A former prison dentist from Sinwar revealed last year that he had managed to recruit large numbers of other Palestinians to the cause while in prison.

“I know how cruel he is, I never underestimated his abilities, but unfortunately others did… he knows us very well, he follows Israeli society, our politics, our debates,” Dr. Yuval Biton told Bild, the German gossip magazine.

Dr. Biton also recalled that Sinwar was asked to sign a document denouncing terrorism before his release. He refused after reading it, and many other Palestinian prisoners followed suit, in an early sign of his leadership skills.

“He asked what it was… and then he refused to sign the document, and all subsequent Hamas prisoners then refused as well,” he said.

His release came in 2011 as part of the famous Shalit prisoner swap, in which Israel released 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

After climbing the ranks of Hamas for another six years, he became leader in Gaza, responding to Ismail Haniyeh, the movement’s Doha-based political leader, who was assassinated earlier this year – almost certainly by Israel – in Tehran .

After the October 7 attacks, Sinwar proved very elusive for the Israeli forces as they invaded the Strip. Israeli news reports have suggested that he was constantly surrounded by Israeli hostages, making it impossible to attack the Hamas leader without killing them as well.

He communicated largely through handwritten notes and was thought to live largely underground in Hamas’ tunnel network.

Before October 2023, some Israeli officials wondered whether Sinwar, the fluent Hebrew-speaking and Israeli politics-obsessed, could become a more moderate figure within Hamas.

He made some rapprochement with neighboring Egypt and allowed a major increase in the number of permits given to Gazans to cross the border and work in Israel by 2022.

In fact, it was all a ruse: Sinwar had been planning the largest attack on Israel ever, even as the permits were being handed out, culminating in the October 7, 2023 attacks.

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