Yahya Sinouar, long a man in the shadows before taking the head of Hamas this summer, is considered one of the architects of the unprecedented attack of the Palestinian Islamist movement on Israel on October 7, 2023, which plunged the region into a bloody conflict.
• Also read: Hamas leader Yahya Sinouar “eliminated”
The Israeli army announced Thursday that it was “verifying” whether he had been “eliminated” during an operation in the Gaza Strip.
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This radical activist, who succeeded Ismaïl Haniyeh killed in Tehran, was a “death in borrowed time” for the Israeli authorities, who hunted him down for months in the war-ravaged Palestinian territory.
He spent his entire career in the shadows: that of Israeli prisons where he spent 23 years, then that of the security apparatus of the Palestinian Islamist movement where he was responsible for hunting down Israel’s “collaborators”.
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Leader since 2017 of the Palestinian Islamist movement in Gaza, he is, at 61, one of the masterminds of October 7: that day, hundreds of commandos descended on kibbutzim, military bases and an electronic music festival in Israel, which was experiencing its worst attack against civilians since its creation in 1948.
The results were 1,206 dead and 251 people taken hostage, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli data.
“It’s his strategy, it’s him who set up the operation” probably for a year or two, explains to AFP Leila Seurat, researcher at the Arab Center for Research and Political Studies (CAREP) in Paris.
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The ascetic man, with white hair but full black eyebrows, “imposed his tempo to change the balance of power on the ground and took everyone by surprise,” according to her.
The one who is now “the face of the devil” or the “death on borrowed time”, in the terms of the Israeli army, had not appeared in public since October 2023.
“He is the security man par excellence,” Abou Abdallah, a former Hamas fellow detainee, told AFP in 2017, who judges that Sinouar “takes decisions with the utmost calm.”
Intransigent
In 1987, the first Intifada (the uprising against the Israeli occupation) broke out in a refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip. He, who was born in Khan Younès, a camp in the south of the territory, joined the newly founded Hamas.
At 25, he already heads the Jihad and Preaching Organization, the Hamas intelligence unit which punishes “collaborators”, those Palestinians punished for intelligence with the Israeli enemy.
In 1988, he founded Majd, Hamas’ internal security service.
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Incarcerated in 1989, he established himself as a leader of the prisoners. Sentenced to life imprisonment several times, he was released in 2011 with a thousand detainees released by Israel, in exchange for soldier Gilad Shalit, hostage of Hamas for five years.
Yahya Sinouar sees Israel eliminate his mentors, notably Sheikh Ahmed Yassine, founder of Hamas, and Salah Chehadé, founder of the Ezzedine al-Qassam brigades, the armed wing of the movement, of which he is considered the right arm.
Placed on the American list of “international terrorists”, he is the subject of multiple assassination attempts.
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From 2017, he pushed a strategy that was “radical on the military level and pragmatic in politics”, deciphers Mme Seurat. “He does not advocate force for force’s sake” but “to bring (the Israelis) to negotiations.”
“He is someone who Hamas knows is totally intransigent,” adds Tahani Mustafa of the International Crisis Group (ICG).
Strangled “with a keffiyeh”
Israeli media published excerpts of his interrogations. He recounts having kidnapped a traitor and having taken him to the cemetery of Khan Younes: “I put him in a grave and I strangled him with a keffiyeh (…) he knew he deserved to die” .
On the political level, he advocates a united Palestinian leadership for all the Occupied Territories: the Gaza Strip, held by Hamas, the West Bank, administered by the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, and East Jerusalem.
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“He made it known that he would punish anyone who tried to hinder reconciliation with Fatah (the presidential party, Editor’s note),” recalls the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).
“On several occasions, he proposed a long-term truce with Israel if the country withdrew from the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem,” recalls Khaled al-Hroub, Middle East specialist at the Northwestern University in Qatar.
He judges that Mr. Sinouar is “in the concrete”.
At all costs, he intended to force Israel and the world to take an interest in the fate of the Palestinians. The strategy of respectability of Hamas “policies” fails: it will choose violence. The Israeli response as of October 7 has already caused more than 42,438 deaths, according to the Hamas Ministry of Health.
In mid-September, he said Hamas was ready for a “long war of attrition” against Israel with the support of Lebanese Hezbollah, Houthi rebels in Yemen and Iran.
