On Thursday, October 17, the Israeli army radio said that Israel had killed Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar in combat in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. The military stated that it was investigating whether the body that it found following a battle with Palestinian fighters was Sinwar, which had been sent for DNA testing. Later in the day, the Israeli army said that the collected samples matched the DNA record that Israel had on Sinwar from his years of imprisonment in Israeli custody.
Israeli social media accounts began to circulate images of the body online before the news first broke. The photos depicted a man closely resembling Sinwar wearing a military vest and lying amidst the rubble of a building with a noticeable wound to the skull.
The Israeli army’s initial statement claimed that Israeli troops engaged three Palestinian fighters in battle in Rafah’s Tal al-Sultan neighborhood on Wednesday night before killing them. After the Israeli soldiers inspected the bodies of the slain fighters, they reportedly noticed that one of them closely resembled the Hamas leader, which they allegedly identified by his teeth.
Israeli officials have stated that the alleged killing of Sinwar “was coincidental and not based on intelligence” and that no hostages were involved, Axios reported. Israel’s war minister Yoav Gallant also reportedly told U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that DNA testing had confirmed that the body belonged to Sinwar.
As of the time of writing, Hamas has not commented on the incident or released a statement.
Who is Yahya Sinwar?
Sinwar was announced as the head of Hamas’s politburo following Israel’s assassination of his predecessor Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in late July. Up until that point, Sinwar had served as the head of Hamas’s Gaza branch.
Sinwar was born in 1962 in the Khan Younis refugee camp to a family of Palestinian refugees expelled from their home city of Askalan 21 kilometers north of Gaza in 1948. He received his education in UNRWA schools and then obtained a degree in Arabic from the Islamic University of Gaza.
Sinwar joined Hamas in the late 1980s and is credited with founding Hamas’s “al-Majd” intelligence apparatus, which later merged with other armed cells and formed the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the movement, in 1993. Sinwar was arrested by Israeli forces and sentenced to life in prison in 1989 on charges of killing collaborators with the Israeli army.
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In prison, Sinwar immersed himself in studying Hebrew, as well as Israeli literature and politics. He also rose through Hamas’s ranks while behind bars and won the trust of Palestinian prisoners of other political affiliations, becoming a significant figure within the Palestinian leadership in prison. He also gave interviews to Israeli media channels from prison when presenting Hamas’s political positions. While in prison, Sinwar published a novel titled Thorns and Carnations, which tells the story of a Palestinian refugee family in the al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza.
In 2004, Sinwar underwent brain surgery while in Israeli jails. According to Sinwar’s lawyer at the time and Palestinian prisoner support groups, the surgery was conducted after pressure was put on the Israeli prison services by Palestinian prisoners to treat Sinwar, who suffered from a blood mass in the brain. Israel later claimed that Sinwar suffered from a brain tumor and that the surgery saved his life. Sinwar never confirmed nor denied either version.
In 2011, Sinwar was released along with 1,000 other Palestinian prisoners in exchange for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been in Hamas custody in Gaza since 2006. Sinwar was reportedly an instrumental figure in negotiating the Shalit prisoner release deal from within prison.
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Sinwar was elected as the head of the Gaza branch of Hamas upon his release, and he became a central figure in Palestinian politics, coordinating talks to bridge gaps between different Palestinian factions and participating in national reconciliation talks. He was known for his approach of direct communication with his support base, using popular slang in public speeches and often walking in the streets unguarded or visiting families affected by Israeli airstrikes. He once said in a live televised interview with an Arab media channel that he “never wanted to wear a suit” and that his assistants forced him to wear it for political appearances.
Sinwar is believed to have played a key role in the formulation of Hamas’s 2017 charter, which, for the first time, accepted a Palestinian state on the June 1967 borders and recognized the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The charter also excluded the movement’s hostility to Jews and affirmed that its conflict was with the Zionist colonization of Palestine. The move was seen as an attempt by Hamas to moderate its public image and disassociate itself from the more fundamentalist rhetoric of its 1987 charter.
Sinwar was also part of the formulation of Hamas’s initiative for a long-term truce with Israel in exchange for lifting the blockade on Gaza. He repeatedly proposed the idea in public speeches and interviews.
Sinwar and the road to October 7
Sinwar began to change his rhetoric regarding a truce and repeatedly hinted at an impending “flood” in public speeches following the 2021 “Battle of the Sword of Jerusalem” between Israel and Hamas, which was triggered by Israel’s attempt to expel Palestinian families from Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and Israeli police raids on Palestinian worshipers inside the al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan.
Following the October 7 attack last year, Qassam Brigades commander Muhammad al-Deif announced the beginning of “Operation al-Aqsa Flood.” Israel accused Sinwar of masterminding the operation.
Following the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in late July, Sinwar became Hamas’s top leader, heading the politburo and continuing to coordinate Gaza’s military resistance efforts and the captive exchange negotiations.
If confirmed, Sinwar would be the fourth Hamas chief to be killed by Israel, although notably by “coincidence” and not as a result of a deliberate assassination attempt. The first major Hamas leader to be assassinated by Israel was the movement’s founder, Ahmad Yasin, during the Second Intifada in March 2004. Yasin’s successor and co-founder of the movement, Abdul Aziz al-Rantisi, was assassinated only 17 days later.
After the assassination of Yasin and Rantisi, Hamas’s politburo was headed by Khaled Meshaal, who would continue to hold the post until stepping down in 2017. During Meshaal’s period of leadership, the politburo chief was seen as prioritizing Hamas’s integration into Middle East politics and presenting an alternative leadership to the Palestinian Authority with the help of Qatar and Turkey, especially during the post-Arab Spring years. Meshaal’s political leanings have been contrasted with other parts of the movement that more actively favored maintaining relations with Iran and pursuing a strategy of militant resistance to Israel.
The politburo of Hamas was then led by Haniyeh, who has also been described as a “moderate” who tried to maintain political alliances in the region, although the delineation between “moderates” and “radicals” within the Hamas leadership has been criticized and regarded as an exaggeration by some analysts. Haniyeh initiated a rapprochement with Syria, with the participation of Hamas leader Saleh al-Aruri, following Hamas’s earlier break with Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah during the initial years of the Syrian Civil War. At around the same time, Sinwar became the head of Hamas in Gaza.
Also read: Demystifying how the Hamas leadership works
The 2021 war with Israel that came on the back of the “Unity Intifada” in Jerusalem and all of historic Palestine marked a turning point in Hamas’s strategy of militant resistance. An important background to this development is the brutal crackdown and systematic Israeli maiming of Palestinian protesters during the Great March of Return demonstrations in 2018 and 2019, which Hamas supported.
It was shortly after the 2021 “Sword of Jerusalem” confrontation that the initial planning for October 7 reportedly started. Sinwar would escalate his rhetoric supporting a broad military confrontation with Israel, and he even presented an award to a 2022 Gaza-based television show called Fist of the Free, which portrayed a fictional account of a Hamas-led military operation against Israeli army bases outside of Gaza, bearing a stark resemblance to the al-Aqsa Flood Operation nearly a year later. At the award ceremony, Sinwar said that the series should not be seen as “unrelated” to Hamas’s actions but was, in fact, “integral to what we are preparing.” Likewise, the military drills of the Qassam Brigades in those years, widely publicized in Hamas’s media, recreated military scenarios that replicated the October 7 attack. At the time, Israeli intelligence regarded Hamas’s military drills as for show and considered Sinwar’s fiery rhetoric bluster.
After the 2021 round, Sinwar emerged as a vocal proponent of the strategy of the “unity of fields.” This strategy was meant to link Palestinian struggles in their different geographic locations, from the West Bank, to Gaza, and to the communities of Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship. Moreover, it also meant linking the resistance in Gaza to the broader “Axis of Resistance” in the region, most directly Hezbollah and with Iran as a backer. It was this strategy that coincided with Sinwar’s reassertion of armed resistance as Hamas’s long-term orientation.
The ascension of Sinwar to the post of politburo chief in the midst of the ongoing genocide in Gaza has been understood as a return of Hamas’s political center of gravity to Gaza and a reaffirmation of its roots of militant resistance. If confirmed, the circumstances of his death, as relayed by Israeli sources, would only reinforce this legacy.
Condolences to Sinwar’s fans at Mondoweiss.