Key Hamas plotters of October 7 evade Israel’s grip on Gaza
Recently, clouds of kites dropped from the skies above Gaza, dropped by the Israeli army, asking for tips on the whereabouts of top Hamas leaders.
“The end of Hamas is near,” the fliers proclaimed in Arabic, promising hefty bounties to anyone who helped bring about the arrest of those who had “brought destruction and ruin to the Gaza Strip.”
Gaza’s Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, topped the list in exchange for a $400,000 reward – more than 1,500 times Gaza’s average monthly wage.
Israel’s goal in the war is to destroy Hamas, the armed Palestinian group that rules Gaza, and ignite war there by attacking Israel on October 7. But despite a military campaign that has left nearly 20,000 dead in Gaza and reduced entire neighborhoods to rubble, Israel has yet to locate Mr. Sinwar and other senior Hamas figures believed to be key conspirators in the attack 10 weeks ago .
Israel considers Mr. Sinwar crucial to the Oct. 7 attack, which killed about 1,200 people while about 240 others were taken back to Gaza as prisoners, Israeli officials say. Now in his 50s, he was one of the founders of Hamas in the late 1980s and developed a tough reputation for punishing Palestinians suspected of spying for Israel.
“He is a very tough guy, a brutal guy,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, an associate professor of political science at Al-Azhar University in Gaza, who is now in Cairo.
Mr. Sinwar’s unyielding commitment to his organization’s Islamist ideology makes it unlikely that he will go down easily.
“If he is killed, he goes to heaven. He doesn’t really care much about his life,” said Mr. Abusada, describing Mr. Sinwar’s mentality. “Israel would be mistaken if it thought he would surrender or that Sinwar would raise a white flag.”
Israel is also looking for Mr Sinwar’s brother and confidant, Mohammed. He has not been seen since the start of the war, although the Israeli military this week released a Hamas video shot in Gaza showing him driving a car through an underground tunnel in Gaza.
The airmen dropped over Gaza offered $300,000 for information leading to his capture.
Also named in the flyers were Rafi Salameh, a Hamas military commander, and Mohammed Deif, the leader of Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, who is believed to have lost an eye and been seriously injured in previous Israeli attempts to kill him.
Israel offered $200,000 for information on Mr. Salameh and $100,000 for Mr. Deif.
But the biggest symbolic and operational blow Israel could deal to Hamas would be to kill Mr. Sinwar, analysts and Israeli officials said. Despite the destruction of much of Hamas’s infrastructure in Gaza, Mr. Sinwar still retains some control over the group’s operations and was able to fulfill last month’s prisoner swap with Israel, which was negotiated by Hamas leaders in exile negotiated.
Unlike most Hamas military figures, who remained in the shadows even before the start of this war, Mr. Sinwar often attended events and gave speeches, raising his profile among Palestinians and Israelis. His assassination would not only jeopardize Hamas’s operations but almost certainly dampen morale, while the Israelis would be cheered.
The elusiveness of these top Hamas figures deprives Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of tangible evidence to show both his domestic audience and a growing chorus of foreign leaders calling for a ceasefire that Israel is making progress toward its goal to eradicate Hamas.
In the past ten days, about two-thirds of the United Nations General Assembly has approved a non-binding resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire; Britain, France and Germany urged an armistice; and the Biden administration sent senior officials to pressure Israel to scale back the intensity of the war in coming weeks in favor of a tactical campaign targeting Hamas.
But Netanyahu has vowed to keep fighting, and Israeli officials have proposed a longer timeline that could see intensive bombing and ground maneuvers well into next year.
Israeli officials insist they have made progress in humiliating Hamas by killing thousands of its fighters, including key commanders, and destroying parts of a vast tunnel network the group built to secretly move fighters and weapons through the area to transport.
The fact that top Hamas leaders in Gaza have so far confounded Israel’s efforts to find them leaves open the possibility that they could survive the war and work to renew the group’s capabilities. to breathe life into it after the guns have fallen silent.
Israel had already missed several opportunities over the years to remove Mr. Sinwar from the battlefield.
According to Israeli court records, he was arrested and tried in 1988 for the murder of four Palestinians suspected of spying for Israel. He spent more than twenty years in prison in Israel, where he later said he spent his time getting to know his enemy: he learned Hebrew, read widely and became a leader among the Palestinian prisoners.
“There is no doubt that he is stubborn and a good negotiator,” said Sofyan Abu Zaydeh, a former Palestinian official in the West Bank who met Mr. Sinwar in the late 1980s near the end of his own 12-year prison sentence.
He described Mr Sinwar as deeply ideological. In 1993, other Palestinian factions signed interim peace agreements with Israel, known as the Oslo Accords, which recognized Israel’s right to exist and established the Palestinian Authority, a kind of future government. Hamas rejected these agreements and stuck to its pledge to destroy Israel, and Mr. Sinwar refused to meet representatives of the more moderate Palestinian Authority.
“He said that those who are products of Oslo, I do not recognize them,” Mr Abu Zaydeh said.
Mr. Sinwar served multiple life sentences, but was released in 2011 after exchanging 1,026 Palestinians for an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, captured by Hamas five years earlier.
Mr. Sinwar returned to Gaza vowing to free the remaining Palestinian prisoners, whom many Palestinians considered unjustly held.
“He promised his colleagues when he left that their freedom was his burden,” said Mr. Abu Zaydeh, who was himself released in 1993 and served as minister for prisoner affairs in the Palestinian Authority. “October. 7 was at a basic level about freeing prisoners.”
Since the October attack, other Hamas leaders have said this was a central target of the attack, and last month Hamas managed to secure the release of 240 Palestinians by Israel in exchange for 105 Israelis. There are still about 120 hostages in Gaza, some of them soldiers whom Hamas would like to exchange for more prisoners with a higher profile.
Yuval Bitton, former head of the intelligence department of Israel’s prison services, said Israel decided to release Mr. Sinwar instead of other prisoners because he had no Israeli blood on his hands. The exchange of Palestinian prisoners who have murdered Israelis is a highly charged issue for the Israeli public and rarely happens.
Mr Bitton, who was employed but not yet in charge at the time, said he had seen Mr Sinwar’s ability to influence other prisoners and even events outside the prison and had therefore argued against Mr Sinwar’s release .
“I told them that the fact that he would be released would have a very big impact on the ground – that he was a great danger and that within a year he would be the head of Hamas.”
He was overruled.
Six years later, in 2017, Mr Sinwar became the head of Hamas in Gaza. He gave fiery speeches calling on Palestinians to prepare guns, cleavers, axes and knives for the fight against Israel, and he had a fire for the dramatic.
After the last war between Israel and Hamas in 2021, Mr Sinwar announced at the end of a live television address that he would be walking home and dared Israel to kill him. Then him strolled through the streets of Gazawaving at shopkeepers and pausing for photos with admirers.
Perhaps his greatest tactical success, however, was misleading Israel in recent years into thinking he wanted to avoid war and improve the lives of Gazans.
He urged the access of Qatari aid to Gaza and an increase in the number of Gazans allowed to work in Israel, both desperately needed in the impoverished region. He even kept Hamas fighters out of clashes between Israel and other militant groups.
“He was able to deceive Israel,” said Akram Attaallah, a columnist at the West Bank-based newspaper Al-Ayyam. “The whole image was that he wanted stability and development in Gaza.”
Meanwhile, Hamas prepared for the October 7 attacks, which were the deadliest day in Israel’s modern history and sparked the war in Gaza, which has killed about 20,000 Palestinians in 10 weeks.
Mr. Sinwar’s location remains a mystery, as do his thoughts on the war and the future of Hamas. But people who met him said any hope that he would surrender to stop the war was in vain, regardless of what that meant for Gaza’s citizens.
“He is going to fight to the end,” said Mr. Abusada, an associate professor. “Unfortunately, the more this continues, the more the Palestinian civilian population loses.”
Jo Becker And Abu Bakr Bashir reporting contributed.