Who is Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas political leader in Gaza?

WARNING: This story contains graphic details

Decades before Yahya Sinwar became the political leader of Hamas in Gaza, Israeli journalist and author Ehud Yaari sat down with him over hummus in an Israeli prison in the Negev desert. He describes Sinwar, who conversed in fluent Hebrew, as a curious but cunning Islamist, bent upon the destruction of the state of Israel.

"He is not somebody who's thinking about negotiations, a two-state solution — that's not Sinwar," said Yaari, who interviewed Sinwar in prison four times between 1993 and 2001.

"He was very clear that the state of Israel should be destroyed, and the Jews cannot be a part of a Palestinian state.

"He was willing to make an exception of me — jokingly," said Yaari, who is now a fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Described by Israeli officials as the architect of the Oct. 7 attacks that killed 1,200, Sinwar, 61, was a founding member of Hamas and its military wing, the Qassam Brigades.

Born in 1962 in the Khan Younis refugee camp at the southern end of the Gaza Strip, he joined Hamas when it was created in 1987 and was favoured by its founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

Yassin charged Sinwar with the creation of al-Majd, Hamas's internal security organization, which he used to hunt down and kill those suspected of collaborating with Israel.

Once, Yaari says, Sinwar punished a suspected informer by having the man's brother bury him alive, ordering the brother to finish the job with a spoon.

In another instance, Sinwar confessed to killing a man named Ramsi, whom he suspected of collaborating with Israelis. He told Israeli interrogators he strangled the man with a keffiyeh scarf, saying, "I wrapped him in a white shroud and closed the grave. I was sure that Ramsi knew he deserved to die."

Sinwar was convicted by an Israeli court in 1989 for the murder of 12 Palestinians he considered Israeli collaborators. He was serving four life sentences until 2011, when he was released alongside 1,026 other prisoners in exchange for captured IDF soldier Gilad Shalit.

But even while in prison, Yaari says Sinwar's domineering personality and ruthlessness earned him a position of power as the spokesman for his fellow inmates, irrespective of whether they were members of Hamas, Fatah or another organization.

"It's either you are for him or you are afraid of him, and then you are fine," said Yaari, who notes that whenever Sinwar sees someone as a potential opponent, "He would kill him. No hesitation."

After his release, Sinwar was re-integrated into the Hamas leadership, and by 2017 he was appointed the new political leader of the Gaza Strip, replacing Ismail Haniyeh, who now leads Hamas's political bureau from Qatar. Sinwar was reappointed to the post in 2021.