GAZA STRIP — After a career in the shadows, spent in Israeli prisons and the internal security apparatus of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar has emerged as leader of the Palestinian group in the middle of a full-blown war.
Sinwar, who until now was the movement’s Gaza chief, replaces Ismail Haniyeh, whose killing in Tehran last week sent tensions soaring across the Middle East and raised fears of a coordinated attack on Israel by Iran and its regional proxies.
By choosing him as the group’s chief Hamas “is sending a strong message to the occupation that Hamas continues its path of resistance”, a senior Hamas official told AFP.
Sinwar stands accused of masterminding the group’s October 7 attacks, the worst in Israel’s history, which left 1,198 dead and 251 taken hostage according to an AFP tally and Israeli official figures.
In the aftermath of that attack, the Israeli military insisted he was a “dead man walking”, although Sinwar has not been seen since.
The October 7 attack was probably a year or two in the planning, “took everyone by surprise” and “changed the balance of power on the ground”, said Leila Seurat of the Arab Centre for Research and Political Studies (CAREP) in Paris.
The ascetic 61-year-old is a security operator “par excellence”, according to Abu Abdallah, a Hamas member who spent years alongside him in Israeli jails.
“He makes decisions in the utmost calm, but is intractable when it comes to defending the interests of Hamas,” Abu Abdallah told AFP in 2017, after his former co-detainee was elected Hamas’s leader in Gaza. — (AFP)