Yahya Sinwar, 61, was a founding member of Hamas and has risen to become perhaps its most powerful figure. Israeli officials have described him as the architect of the 7 October attacks, which killed 1,200, mostly civilians, and so “a dead man walking”.
Now he may hold the key to the current negotiations over the release of the hostages in Gaza.
Born in a refugee camp at the southern end of the Gaza Strip, Sinwar was drawn into Islamist activism when he studied at the Islamic University of Gaza in the early 1980s, as a religious resurgence across the Middle East gathered momentum.
In 1987, he joined the newly created group Hamas, and was made head of its nascent intelligence service. Duties included uncovering spies or other “collaborators” with Israel as well as people in Gaza who infringed Hamas’s strict “morality” codes.
Arrested in 1988 and sentenced to four life sentences for attempted murder and sabotage, he then spent 23 years in Israeli jails. In prison, Sinwar refused to talk to any Israelis and personally punished those who did, pressing the face of one into a makeshift stove, according to one Israeli former interrogator who worked at the institution where Sinwar was held.
“He’s 1,000% committed and 1,000% violent, a very, very hard man,” said the interrogator.
But he is also a sophisticated political operator with a sharp mind. Sinwar used his time in prison to learn Hebrew and study his enemy, gaining knowledge that may be helpful now.
When released with more than 1,000 prisoners swapped in 2011 for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas five years earlier, Sinwar returned to frontline militancy immediately, stating that he had concluded from his own experience that the capture of Israeli soldiers was the “only way” to free prisoners. A journalist who met Sinwar at the time told the Guardian the Hamas leader was so focused it was like “the world didn’t exist beyond his eyeballs”.
Six years after his release, Sinwar assumed the overall command of Hamas in Gaza, consolidating relations between the organisation’s military and civil administrative wings and marginalising the political leadership overseas.
Though military commanders probably planned the details of the 7 October attacks, Sinwar is thought to have instigated the operation and been involved in almost all aspects.
He is now in hiding, possibly in the network of tunnels Hamas have built under southern Gaza.