Yahya Sinwar: The Mastermind Behind the October 7 Attacks

Yahya Sinwar’s name is synonymous with the ongoing war in Gaza and with the vicious attack on October 7, 2023, which sparked it. Although he only recently became the outright leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas, in the wake of the death of Ismail Haniyeh in July 2024, it is Yahya Ibrahim Hassan Sinwar who has directed Hamas’ operations on the ground in the Gaza Strip for the better part of a decade. It is also he who is held by Israel as the chief strategist behind the attack which saw thousands of the group’s fighters stream into Israel, leaving a brutal aftermath in its wake.

The Origins of Yahya Sinwar and Early Militancy

Yahya Sinwar is from Khan Younis, the second city of the Gaza Strip, located only a few kilometers from both the Mediterranean coast and the border with Egypt. Sinwar’s family originated from the city of Ashkelon, and were displaced by the intercommunal fighting during the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. During his formative years in the 1970s, conflict raged between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation alongside militant groups such as Black September, with multiple bloody massacres taking place in Israel and abroad.

The cause of Palestinian statehood achieved through militant means was, at the time, pursued mostly by Arab nationalist organisations, who were ideologically secular. But as Sinwar reached adulthood, a new form of Palestinian militancy was beginning to emerge in the form of Sunni Islamist Jihadism, toward which some Palestinians began to turn to take the mantle of their struggle. As a young man, Sinwar himself had turned towards Islamism and led an organisation called Al-Majd in the mid-1980s, which merged into Hamas when the latter formed in 1987.

Over the next few years, Hamas followed through on its commitment to violence in the name of Palestinian liberation through a bombing campaign against Israeli targets. The bombings, which occurred against the backdrop of the First Intifada, helped bring Hamas to public attention and with it, its leaders and members were also cast into the spotlight. For his part, Sinwar had thrown himself into the organisation with aplomb, quickly becoming a key and ruthless member of its security apparatus, and dishing out vicious punishments against suspected collaborators with Israel.

In 1989, he was convicted by a court in Israel of the murder of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. During the course of his trial, Sinwar admitted to brutal retributions carried out against suspected collaborators. He claimed to have lured a man accused of collaboration to a graveyard in Khan Younis, where the man was bundled into a coffin before Sinwar strangled him to death using a Keffiyeh, the traditional headdress worn by Palestinians.

Sinwar was convicted of those four murders and complicity in a total of twelve. He was handed four consecutive life sentences, and the twenty-seven-year-old began his term in a high-security prison near the southern Israeli city of Beersheba without any conceivable prospect of release on the horizon. At least for now, his part in the conflict seemed to be done.

The Founding and Ideological Evolution of Hamas

Hamas was founded in 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Al-Rantisi. The name ‘Hamas’ is an acronym for the longer title ‘Islamic Resistance Movement’, and the word also translates to the Arabic word for ‘zeal’. Its origins lie with the Sunni Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, to which both Yassin and Al-Rantisi had belonged while studying in Egypt, and the second article of its 1988 Covenant or charter actually identified it as the Brotherhood’s chapter in Gaza.

Yassin had been heavily inspired by the success of the Iranian revolution ten years before, when a relatively modern state returned to a conservative theocracy through a mass uprising which overthrew its monarch Mohammed Reza Shah. Yassin founded Hamas with such mobilisation in mind, although initially, he gained local renown for a string of civil projects benefitting the people of Gaza. This included the establishment of an Islamic Center which offered religious, social, cultural, health and sporting services, and he also contributed to the founding of the Islamic University of Gaza in 1978.

Yassin was an influential imam and preacher, and his sermons contributed to a rise in religious devotion among the people of Gaza. He was also active in collecting donations and in helping the families of killed Palestinian militants and prisoners. But Yassin’s community-building activities contrasted starkly with his bloodthirsty plans for Israel.

He delivered bellicose sermons from his mosque in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza, calling for resistance against occupation, and his rhetoric saw an uptick in actions targeting Israeli soldiers. In 1989, Yassin was arrested by Israel and convicted of ordering the deaths of suspected collaborators, and was handed a life term in an Israeli prison. The objectives of Hamas itself were quite clear to those who looked closely enough.

The text of its 1988 Charter made regular reference to jihadist dogma and the supremacy of Islam. Its twenty-seventh article dismissed the Palestine Liberation Organisation, claiming it could not successfully represent the struggle of the Palestinian people while retaining a secular identity. It was also full of antisemitic conspiracy theories, and spoke of Hamas’ struggle against the Jews, while further claiming that Israel would continue to exist only until Islam would obliterate it.

Regarding social policy, Hamas’ positions closely resembled those of other hardline conservative religious factions in other parts of the Middle East and Asia. From 1987 to 1991, the organization campaigned to make wearing of the hijab mandatory, as had become the case in Iran, resulting in the verbal harassment of women who chose not to do so. It also promoted polygamy and the segregation of men and women in many areas of public life, alongside a domestic role for women in the household.

By 1991, Hamas had merged its militant factions to form the notorious Izz Al-Din Al Qassam brigades, which became its military wing and would take the mantle for most of the bombing campaigns it carried out throughout the following decades.

Tactical Shifts, Assassinations, and the Second Intifada

The following year, as the First Intifada raged, Israel attempted to stifle Hamas by rounding up over four hundred of its leading members and deporting them to Lebanon. This solution, however, turned out to be wildly miscalculated. Not only because it received instant condemnation from the international community due to its pseudo-legal nature and because some of those deported were found not to actually be members of Hamas at all, but also because of the strategic links that would be created in Lebanon.

Southern Lebanon, at that time under Israeli occupation, was and remains a heartland for the Shia Islamist organisation Hezbollah, which Hamas’ leadership soon established ties with. Hezbollah, allied with Iran, passed on to Hamas various tactics in urban warfare, guerrilla tactics, and above all, suicide bombing, which would see frequent use before and during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. Israel made a series of similar tactical blunders during the mid-1990s.

In 1996, a targeted explosion killed Yahya Ayyash, Hamas’ principal bomb maker and the man responsible for most of the explosive attacks by Hamas in the previous years. Although this was a significant scalp for Israel, the assassination occurred only shortly after Hamas had promised the PLO to scale back their bombing operations, something which they had largely held to throughout the previous year. The assassination sparked not only an immediate return to such tactics, but further boosted Hamas’ popularity among Palestinians in Gaza, as an estimated one hundred thousand people lined the streets for the funeral of Ayyash.

The following year, Israel brought more negative attention upon itself with a botched assassination attempt on then-Hamas leader Khaled Mashal in Jordan. Mashal, who had recently been elected leader of Hamas in place of the imprisoned Ahmed Yassin, was doused with a fast-acting poison as he left Hamas’ offices in Amman by two undercover Israeli agents. The attack left him in a coma, but the agents were quickly arrested by Jordanian authorities, and Israel found itself under great pressure to provide an antidote as Jordan threatened to withdraw from the 1994 Oslo Accords if Mashal were to die.

With peace on the line, Israel turned over the antidote and was also forced to strike a deal with Jordan, which saw Ahmed Yassin released from imprisonment and returned to Gaza. Unsurprisingly, both events played into the hands of Hamas, who became emboldened enough to begin targeting Israelis indiscriminately. The organisation announced that it now considered all Israeli targets to be legitimate, having previously targeted mostly soldiers and military installations.

It soon began to target the Israeli public with its bomb attacks, carrying these out at bus stops and on public transport, and eventually in places like shopping malls and nightclubs. The Second Intifada began in the year 2000, and Hamas’ attacks resulted in over one thousand Israeli deaths over five years, with most of these being civilians. This represented a significantly higher death toll than Israel had suffered in the First Intifada.

The Elimination of Founders and the Gaza Withdrawal

Faced with this onslaught, Israel took the decision to assassinate Hamas’ founder Ahmed Yassin, which it did by a drone strike in March 2004. The timing of Israel’s strike was strategically questionable. While the logic of targeting the man undeniably behind much of Hamas’ wanton attacks was understandable, the timing and execution of the strike led to much criticism.

The drone attack which killed Yassin also killed some of his entourage and nine civilian bystanders. This, combined with the targeted killing of a wheelchair-bound man in frail health, led to condemnation of Israel abroad. Yassin was quadriplegic, having been paralyzed at age twelve in a freak sporting accident.

He was therefore unable to move about independently, and despite his central role in the planning of attacks against Israel, Yassin was now sixty-seven, almost blind and deaf, and in generally poor health. The killing came at a strange time for another reason. Only two months before his assassination, Yassin had indicated a willingness to end the bombing in exchange for the recognition of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, seemingly forgoing the demand for the right of return of displaced Palestinians to their former villages in Israel, one of the Palestinians’ central demands.

Whether this was a genuine offer or not, it did represent a significant departure from the uncompromising positions of Hamas until then. Killing Yassin only a few weeks after this declaration was heavily criticized by some advocates for peace. But Israel, in spite of the criticism, doubled down on its strategy by eliminating the other founder of Hamas, Abdel Aziz Al-Rantisi, in a similar strike only three weeks later.

The funerals of both men were attended by thousands, and Hamas vowed revenge. The following year, in 2005, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon took another decision which would have significant consequences for all that was to follow. As the Second Intifada drew to an end, the decision was announced by Israel to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza and close all existing Jewish settlements there, as well as to relocate the roughly nine thousand settlers elsewhere.

Strategically, this was yet another questionable move. Even if removing the controversial settlements was morally and legally justified, from a political perspective, especially for Israel, it was difficult to look at it as anything but a debacle. The withdrawal came at a time when Israeli public anger from the many years of suicide bombings was still very high, and to withdraw from Gaza was seen by many Israelis as a capitulation to the Palestinians, generating massive dissatisfaction domestically.

The decision also compromised the Palestinian Authority, led by Yasser Arafat, which was jointly responsible for administering Gaza as per the terms of the Oslo Accords. The Authority was not consulted or informed about the Israeli withdrawal ahead of time, and played no role in the sudden transition from a tightly-controlled security environment into a vacuum which whoever held the public’s attention could now fill. By killing Yassin and Al-Rantisi and then suddenly moving out, Israel left an unprepared Palestinian Authority to try to control an angry and isolated population in Gaza.

With no more Israeli presence in the Strip, the stage was set for a showdown. When legislative elections were held in 2006, Hamas won a stunning victory. It quickly entered a civil conflict with Fatah, the armed wing of the Palestinian Authority.

Without the neutralising presence of the Israeli military, the isolated Fatah were quickly defeated. By 2007, the Gaza Strip was fully under Hamas’ control.

Prison Release and Rise to Power

Throughout all this time, Yahya Sinwar remained in prison. By the time Hamas came to dominate the Gaza Strip, Sinwar had served eighteen years of his life sentence. During his incarceration, he had remained a domineering presence among Palestinian prisoners, commanding respect from Hamas and Fatah members alike.

While in prison he had also been diagnosed with brain cancer, for which he received surgery in an Israeli hospital and survived. Unfortunately, Sinwar’s time in prison had not caused him to mellow whatsoever. Moreover, he would find out he would not serve out his sentence much longer.

In 2011, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu struck a deal with Hamas to release over one thousand Palestinian prisoners in return for captive IDF soldier Gilad Shalit. This deal saw Sinwar’s sentence overturned and he soon arrived back in Gaza a hero, welcomed by adoring crowds amidst a sea of green Hamas flags. As Sinwar himself remarked, this was a starkly different landscape from 1989 when he had been convicted.

At that time, Hamas was a little-known Islamist organisation advocating regressive and conservative social policies, and whose armed wing had not yet consolidated itself into the notorious Izz Al-Din Al Qassam brigades. Now, it was a fully armed and well-structured organisation with wide support, responsible for running the entire territory of the Gaza Strip. The exchange of one Israeli soldier for over a thousand prisoners represented a massive coup for Hamas, especially in light of the many failed negotiations between Israel and other Palestinian representatives.

Sinwar was the most highly-ranked Hamas member to be released and a top priority for the organisation. His return to Gaza was met with a show of strength by Hamas members from the Al Qassam brigades bedecked in combat uniform. Amidst the throng of Al Qassam fighters was Sinwar’s brother Mohammad, also a highly-ranked member of Hamas and the man reportedly responsible for the detention of Shalit during his lengthy captivity in Gaza.

Sinwar had not been inactive during his sentence. For his twenty-two years behind bars, he had continued to remain actively committed to Palestinian militancy, adopting tools which would further his devotion to the destruction of Israel. He spent his time learning the Hebrew language and studying Israeli culture to better strategise and understand his enemy.

By the time he was granted his release, Sinwar had gained fluency in the language and even gave a Hebrew-language interview to an Israeli journalist in which he stated, dishonestly, that he was willing to pursue peaceful resolutions to the conflict. No sooner had he returned to Gaza than he re-affirmed his devotion to Hamas and its violent aims. He quickly rose through its ranks once more, becoming the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip in 2017.

Over the years, Sinwar made ominous statements which openly displayed his plans for a brutal attack against Israel, speaking of a multitude of people streaming across the border like a flood. This attack, referred to by Hamas as the ‘Al Aqsa Flood’, finally came to be on October 7, 2023.

Preparing for October 7th and the Implications for Gaza

In preparation for the attacks, Sinwar and Hamas created a vast expanse of tunnel networks under Gaza, both to evade Israeli intelligence and prepare for their ultimate attack. The massive network, dubbed the ‘Gaza Metro’, encompassed over five hundred kilometers of tunnels by 2021, according to Sinwar himself. In building its tunnel network, Hamas managed to effectively exploit both the limited geographical space of the Gaza Strip, and successfully insulated itself against attacks underneath a densely populated urban area, which Israel and Egypt could only target by likely causing significant civilian casualties.

Hamas’ tactic also represented a cunning use of the sandy coastal topography of Gaza, which was relatively easy to dig through, and which an organisation like Hezbollah could not hope to replicate due to the rocky terrain of southern Lebanon. It is these tunnels which have also allowed Hamas to manoeuvre around the Israeli advances during the ongoing war. While preparing for the attack, Sinwar made sure to continue to incite the Palestinian people to commit acts of violence against Israel.

In 2018, he encouraged Gazans to amass on the border fence with Israel in what became known as the Great March of Return, something which resulted in hundreds of deaths as Israel responded with tear gas and live ammunition. Sinwar did not escape the attention of Israel during this time, which sought to eliminate its sworn enemy outright. Perhaps learning from the Mashal affair, Israel largely abandoned subterfuge-style assassinations and sought to wipe out its targets by air strikes from a distance.

In 2021, one of these strikes was directed at Sinwar, which struck and levelled his house in Gaza to the ground. However, the strike did not kill him, and Sinwar later posed for photos in an armchair in front of the rubble, in a savvy public relations move. Finally, after years of planning, the Hamas operation was ready to begin.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas’ fighters streamed across the frontier and carried out the bloody attack which left over 1,200 Israelis dead, and which plunged Gaza into the brutal conflict which continues to engulf it. If there is one thing that is quite undeniable and certainly not denied by Israel or by Hamas, it is that Israel wants Yahya Sinwar dead. But despite Israel’s advanced military and intelligence capacities, this is no mean feat.

Sinwar is believed to be buried deeply within the Gaza Metro tunnel work and likely surrounded by the remaining hostages, if not by other civilian targets also. How long Sinwar can evade capture or elimination is unclear, but it is possible he may not wish to go down without another significant cost to Israeli lives. The Sinwar experience perhaps also indicates why Israel would, despite the significant pressure exerted upon it to do so, look upon a further prisoner exchange deal with great hesitance.

Experience no doubt shows that for Israel the most likely chosen option will be to seek to simply destroy Hamas once and for all, regardless of cost and the resources expended to do so. If Hamas can survive the current onslaught or even secure another hostage exchange, this may still be seen as a relative victory in the current context. However, there are signs which would indicate that the decision to carry out the October 7 attack may not have been as well-thought-out by Sinwar and Hamas as previously assumed.

For years, Hamas’ strength had been its ability to rely on support from the population of Gaza due to its provision of relative normality and everyday services. Yet, the deplorable conditions into which the Palestinians have been thrown due to the conflict sparked by Hamas’ attack seem to be causing this support to backfire. As the war has dragged on with immense cost to Palestinian lives, some in Gaza have begun to openly criticise their leadership for sustaining the ruinous war alongside the widespread destruction carried with it.

If public enmity with Hamas rises further, it may cause the unbroken chain of domination by the organisation on Gaza to finally topple.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did Yahya Sinwar rise to become Hamas’s top leader in Gaza?

Sinwar began his militant career in the mid-1980s leading an organisation called Al-Majd, which merged into Hamas when it formed in 1987. He quickly became a ruthless member of its security apparatus, was convicted in 1989 of murdering two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians, and received four consecutive life sentences. After 22 years in Israeli prison—during which he learned Hebrew and studied Israeli culture—he was released in 2011 as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange and rose to become leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip in 2017.

What did Sinwar do during his 22 years in an Israeli prison?

Sinwar remained a dominant presence among Palestinian prisoners throughout his incarceration, commanding respect from both Hamas and Fatah members. He was diagnosed with brain cancer and received surgery in an Israeli hospital. He used the time to learn Hebrew fluently and study Israeli culture in order to better understand and strategise against his enemy. He even gave a Hebrew-language interview to an Israeli journalist upon release, falsely claiming willingness to pursue peace.

How did Israel’s 1992 deportation of Hamas members to Lebanon backfire?

Israel rounded up over 400 Hamas members and deported them to southern Lebanon in an attempt to stifle the organisation. Instead, they established ties with Hezbollah, which passed on tactics in urban warfare, guerrilla combat, and—crucially—suicide bombing. These tactics were then deployed extensively by Hamas during the Second Intifada, when the organisation killed over 1,000 Israelis across five years, the majority of them civilians.

What is the Gaza Metro tunnel network and how did Hamas use it?

In preparation for the October 7 attacks, Sinwar and Hamas constructed a vast network of tunnels beneath the Gaza Strip. By 2021, Sinwar himself stated the network encompassed over 500 kilometres. Hamas used the tunnels to evade Israeli intelligence, store weapons, and manoeuvre around Israeli military advances during the ongoing war. The network exploited Gaza’s sandy coastal topography, which was relatively easy to dig through, and its position beneath densely populated areas made targeting it extremely difficult for Israel and Egypt without risking significant civilian casualties.

How did the assassinations of Hamas founders Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Al-Rantisi affect Hamas?

Israel killed Yassin by drone strike in March 2004 and Al-Rantisi in a similar strike just three weeks later. Rather than destroying the organisation, the killings generated massive public outrage and emboldened Hamas—Yassin’s funeral drew an estimated 100,000 people. Within a year, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, creating a power vacuum that Hamas ultimately filled. By 2007, Hamas had defeated the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in a civil conflict and taken full control of the Gaza Strip.

Sources

1. https://manhattan.institute/article/saving-sinwar
2. https://youtu.be/zW_Pu6MFmfk?si=a7Epx-U0tbzVqa4w
3. https://youtu.be/5jsxj7wATIo?si=-TmBf0xpnpa9udyZ
4. https://www.reuters.com/graphics/ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS/GAZA-TUNNELS/gkvldmzorvb/
5. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/doctrine-hamas
6. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/10/hamas-covenant-israel-attack-war-genocide/675602/
7. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/07/middleeast/yahya-sinwar-profile-intl/index.html
8. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp
9. https://apnews.com/article/israel-iran-ismail-haniyeh-killed-tehran-hamas-2d16ae7ed668b954ac0e7a53eaf92671
10. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/26/world/middleeast/hamas-sinwar-israel-doctor-prison-swap.html
11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jsxj7wATIo
12. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0vewvp14zdo