Yahya Sinwar in Gaza City in 2023. He had long been viewed as one of Hamas’s most influential leaders, wielding outsize power while remaining mostly in hiding in underground tunnels.
Credit...Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

Who Is Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s Leader?

Mr. Sinwar, one of the main architects of the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel, has spent decades with the militant group, working his way to the top of its leadership.

by · NY Times

Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas has long been viewed as one of the militant group’s most influential leaders, wielding outsize power while remaining mostly hidden in tunnels beneath Gaza.

Israel’s military said on Thursday that it was examining the possibility that he had been killed in Gaza — a prospect that, if confirmed, would raise hopes of an end to the conflict.

Long considered a planner of Hamas’s military strategy in Gaza, Mr. Sinwar consolidated his power when he was chosen in August to lead the group’s political office as well. He was elevated to that post after the assassination of the group’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh.

Here’s what you need to know:

Sinwar’s formative years

Mr. Sinwar was born in Gaza in 1962 to a family that had fled its home, along with several hundred thousand other Palestinian Arabs who fled or were forced to flee during the wars surrounding the creation of the state of Israel. This displacement deeply influenced his decision to join Hamas in the 1980s.

Mr. Sinwar had been recruited by Hamas’s founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who made him chief of an internal security unit known as Al Majd. His job was to find and punish those suspected of violating Islamic morality laws or cooperating with the Israeli occupiers, a position that eventually landed him in trouble with Israeli authorities.

His life in prison

Mr. Sinwar was imprisoned in 1988 for murdering four Palestinians whom he accused of apostasy or collaborating with Israel, according to Israeli court records. He spent more than two decades in prison in Israel, where he learned Hebrew and developed an understanding of Israeli culture and society.

While incarcerated, Mr. Sinwar took advantage of an online university program and devoured Israeli news. He translated into Arabic tens of thousands of pages of contraband Hebrew-language autobiographies written by the former heads of Israel’s domestic security agency, Shin Bet.

Yuval Bitton, an Israeli dentist who treated Mr. Sinwar when he was in custody and who developed a relationship with him, said Mr. Sinwar had surreptitiously shared the translated pages so that inmates could study the agency’s counterterrorism tactics. Mr. Sinwar liked to call himself a “specialist in the Jewish people’s history,” Dr. Bitton said.

The two men spoke regularly. “The conversations with Sinwar were not personal or emotional,” Dr. Bitton said. “They were only about Hamas.”

Mr. Sinwar knew the Quran by heart, and he coolly laid out his organization’s governing doctrines, Dr. Bitton said, describing Mr. Sinwar’s motivations as religious and not political.

During his time in prison, Mr. Sinwar also wrote a novel called “The Thorn and the Carnation,” a coming-of-age story that limned his own life: The narrator, a Gazan boy named Ahmed, emerges from hiding during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war to a life under Israeli occupation, which causes the “chests of youth to boil like a cauldron.” In retaliation, Ahmed’s friends and family attack the occupiers and those who collaborate with the enemy. Woven throughout the book is the theme of the unending sacrifice demanded by the resistance.

Mr. Sinwar once told an Italian journalist that prison is a crucible. “Prison builds you,” he said, adding that it gave him time to reflect on what he believed in and the price he would be willing to pay for it.

Nonetheless, Mr. Sinwar tried to escape from custody several times, once digging a hole in his cell floor in hopes of tunneling under the prison and exiting through the visitor center. And he found ways to plot against Israel with Hamas leaders on the outside, managing to smuggle cellphones into the prison and use lawyers and visitors to ferry messages out, including about finding ways to kidnap Israeli soldiers to trade for Palestinian prisoners.

These activities foreshadowed the approach Mr. Sinwar would take years later when planning the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

After prison

When he was released from Israeli prison in a prisoner swap in 2011, Mr. Sinwar said that the capture of Israeli soldiers was, after years of failed negotiations, the proven tactic for freeing Palestinians incarcerated by Israel. “For the prisoner, capturing an Israeli soldier is the best news in the universe, because he knows that a glimmer of hope has been opened for him,” Mr. Sinwar said at the time.

After his release from prison, Mr. Sinwar married and had children. He has said little in public about his family but once remarked that “the first words my son spoke were ‘father,’ ‘mother’ and ‘drone.’”

His hard-line stance suggests that he will not be eager to reach a cease-fire agreement with Israel that would end the fighting in Gaza and lead to the return of hostages, living and dead, taken from Israel who are still being held in Gaza.

Indeed, Israeli and U.S. intelligence officers have said that Mr. Sinwar’s strategy is to keep the war in Gaza going for as long as it takes to shred Israel’s international reputation and to damage its relationship with its primary ally, the United States.

What does this mean for cease-fire negotiations?

The death of Mr. Sinwar would raise hopes of an end to the conflict. Both Mr. Sinwar and the Israeli government had refused to compromise during the monthslong negotiations for a truce.

His death could either prompt Hamas to agree to some of Israel’s demands — or provide Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, with a symbolic victory that would give him the political cover he needs to soften his own negotiating stance.

Since the war began, most cease-fire talks have taken place in Egypt and Qatar. But Mr. Sinwar has still played a principal role, even from his hide-out in Gaza. Throughout the talks, Mr. Sinwar’s consent has been required by Hamas’s negotiators before they agree to any concessions, according to officials familiar with the talks.

While Hamas officials have previously insisted that Mr. Sinwar does not have the final say in the group’s decisions, his leadership role in Gaza and his forceful personality have given him outsize importance in how Hamas operates, according to allies and foes alike.

“There’s no decision that can be made without consulting Sinwar,” said Salah al-Din al-Awawdeh, a Hamas member and political analyst who befriended Mr. Sinwar while they were both jailed in Israel during the 1990s and 2000s. “Sinwar isn’t an ordinary leader. He’s a powerful person and an architect of events,” Mr. al-Awawdeh added.

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