Over the past year, Israel has picked off the Hamas leadership one by one – with the chief of the country’s army declaring yesterday that the terror group’s military wing has been ‘defeated’.
But its most wanted target still remains at large – October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar.
The terror group’s leader has remained elusive throughout the year-long war, with the only apparent glimpse of him coming in a video filmed just a couple of days after the bloody conflict began.
The black and white images, uncovered by IDF troops during a raid earlier this year, show a man believed to be Sinwar making his way through a tunnel along with his wife and three children, while carrying a large bag.
‘In that bag is about 25kg of dynamite. Around him are at least 20 hostages,’ according to Kobi Michael, Sinwar’s former Shin Bet interrogator. ‘A few times we have had the chance to kill him, but if we do, he will kill all the hostages around him.’
Some 97 hostages who were kidnapped on October 7, 2023, are believed to still be in Gaza a year on. It is not known how many have died in captivity.
In a year of retribution for the cross-border terror attack by Hamas, relentless Israel bombing of Gaza has resulted in the deaths of more than 40,000 people, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
Israel’s military said it has hit more than 40,000 targets, found 4,700 tunnel shafts and destroyed 1,000 rocket launcher sites during its year-long bombardment of the Strip.
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Sinwar is unrepentant about the October 7 attacks, people in contact with him have said, despite unleashing an Israeli invasion that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, laid waste to his homeland and rained destruction on ally Hezbollah.
The list of Hamas leaders killed in the months since includes Mohammed Deif, the head of the al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, who was killed in an airstrike on Gaza.
Saleh al-Arouri, a founding commander of the al-Qassam Brigades, was assassinated in an explosion in Dahiyeh, a southern suburb of Beirut, which is a stronghold for Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas and part of Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’.
Then in July, the leader of Hamas’s political wing, Ismail Haniyeh, was blown up, most likely by Israel, while visiting Tehran to attend the inauguration of the Iranian president.
Sinwar, 62, was appointed as the leader of Hamas after Haniyeh’s assassination.
Yahya Sinwar will never surrender,’ Michael told The Times. ‘He’s dreaming about staying on as the leader of Hamas in Gaza. He’s thinking now about the next massacre. That man must be killed.’
Operating from the shadows of a network of labyrinthine tunnels under Gaza, Israeli sources said Sinwar and his brother, also a top commander, have so far dodged airstrikes.
He moves constantly to avoid detection and uses trusted messengers for non-digital communication, according to Hamas officials.
Negotiators would wait for days for responses filtered through a secretive chain of messengers.
Last month, reports emerged that Sinwar had been killed in an Israeli airstrike, but these were not confirmed and intelligence sources refuted the claims.
Israeli journalist Ben Caspit quoted sources as saying: ‘There have also been times in the past when he disappeared and we thought he was dead, but then he reappeared.’
In December, reports swirled that Sinwar may have been killed, wounded, or could have fled to Sinai in Egypt.
It later emerged that he had been out of touch with his subordinates as part of his hiding tactics.
Israeli soldiers operate at the opening to a tunnel at Al Shifa Hospital compound in Gaza City last November
One hundred days of war in Gaza have passed since October 7. Thousands of Israelis rally on the streets of Tel Aviv to call for a hostage deal and the ouster of Netanyahu from office
Sinwar was born in Gaza’s Khan Younis refugee camp in 1962 and joined Hamas soon after its founding in the 1980s, dedicating himself to its radical Islamist ideology, which seeks to establish an Islamic state in historic Palestine and opposes Israel’s existence.
He became the protégé of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Hamas’s founder, as a young man, and was first arrested by Israel in 1982 while he was a student at the Islamic University in Gaza.
In prison, he gained a fearsome reputation as a ruthless enforcer, murdering suspected Israeli collaborators, and earned the nickname the Butcher of Khan Younis.
He emerged as a street hero from his brutal 22-year sentence, which he was given for masterminding the abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians. He then quickly rose to the top of the Hamas ranks.
People who know Sinwar say his resolve was shaped by his impoverished childhood and two brutal decades in Israeli custody, including a period in Ashkelon, the town his parents called home before fleeing after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
The question of hostages and prisoner swaps is deeply personal for him, the sources said, and he has vowed to free all Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.
Over months of failed ceasefire talks, led by Qatar and Egypt, that focused on swapping prisoners for hostages, Sinwar was the sole decision-maker, according to three Hamas sources.
Obsessive, disciplined and dictatorial, the wiry, grey-haired leader is one of Hamas’s most hardline elements and is hell-bent on continuing the fight against Israel, despite the heavy price being paid by the Palestinian people.
His elimination is among the Israeli military’s top priorities. He is considered to have been the architect of the October 7 massacre, which saw 1,200 people killed and 250 taken as hostages by Hamas and other terror groups, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel accuses Sinwar (pictured) of masterminding the unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel that triggered the war
A Pro-Palestinian protester holds a picture of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar during a march ahead of the October 7 attack anniversary near the White House in Washington
‘Yahya Sinwar is the face of evil,’ said Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, a spokesman for the IDF, said in the days after the attack. ‘He is the mastermind behind this, like bin Laden was.
‘He built his career on murdering Palestinians when he understood they were collaborators. That’s how he became known as the butcher of Khan Younis.’
Hecht vowed that Israeli troops would not rest until he was found and killed, and declared him a ‘dead man walking’.
Ehud Yaari, 79, an Israeli journalist who claims to have been in contact with Sinwar via intermediaries until a few months ago, said Israel is ‘extremely reluctant’ to kill the terror chief because of his use of hostages as human shields.
The IDF says the man circled in red above is Yahya Sinwar in footage reportedly taken on October 10
It was unclear from the footage (pictured above) where the tunnel was located, but in recent weeks the Israeli military has pounded Khan Yunis, southern Gaza’s main city and Sinwar’s hometown
Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah using US-made bunker-busting bombs, which penetrate deep into their targets before exploding, would undoubtedly kill any hostages around Sinwar as well as the target himself.
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‘Did they have opportunities? Yes. But who will give the order? I don’t know of any Israeli leader who would sanction the bombing of Sinwar when there are Israeli hostages around him,’ Yaari said.
Sinwar’s tactics have allowed him to evade detection for years. He was added to the US list of the most wanted ‘international terrorists’ in 2015, and he has revelled in taunting Israel and its ally.
In a show of defiance two years ago, he ended one of his few public speeches by inviting Israel to assassinate him, proclaiming: ‘I will walk back home after this meeting.’ He then did so, shaking hands and taking selfies with people in the streets.
Dailymail Report