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Yahya Sinwar was on Israel's most wanted list since the deadly October 7 attack last year. The Hamas leader was killed by chance Thursday when Israeli troops fired at a masked militant in a building. Sinwar was a rarely seen force driving the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. NPR's Daniel Estrin has this profile.
DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: Yahya Sinwar earned a nickname among Palestinians - the butcher of Khan Younis, the city where he grew up in South Gaza. His role in Hamas for years was to help root out suspected Palestinian spies for Israel. He was accused of playing a role in killing Israeli soldiers and Palestinian informants, and he spent two decades in Israeli prisons. One man who remembers him well is former Palestinian prisoner Esmat Mansour.
ESMAT MANSOUR: We have so many secrets.
ESTRIN: Mansour says Sinwar at the time had a small team of confidantes in prison. They'd smuggle in cell phones and look out for inmates serving as informants for Israel.
Did he ever find spies in jail?
MANSOUR: So many spies.
ESTRIN: So many spies, he said. In 2006, while Sinwar was still in prison, Hamas in Gaza captured an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. The man who guarded the captive soldier was Sinwar's brother. After five years, Hamas freed the soldier in exchange for Israel releasing more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Sinwar's brother ran the negotiations and made sure Sinwar was at the top of the list to be freed. That gave him a VIP status in prison, and his release helped Sinwar rise in the ranks to lead Hamas in Gaza. He was security conscious and rarely appeared in public, but he did hold press conferences with the international press after bloody rounds of conflict between Hamas and Israel.
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YAHYA SINWAR: (Non-English language spoken).
ESTRIN: In 2018, Sinwar sat at a table. He spoke to the assembled journalists and into the NPR microphone. He was short and wiry with cropped white hair.
At the time Hamas was holding captive two Israeli citizens and the bodies of two Israeli soldiers. I asked Sinwar about the captives. He refused to talk about them. Hamas is still holding those captives. At the time Sinwar had a message for the visiting press.
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SINWAR: (Non-English language spoken).
ESTRIN: He said the media played an important role for the Palestinian cause, reporting on violent protests at the time along the Israeli border, in which Israeli soldiers killed hundreds of Palestinians. He said Palestinians were protesting Israel, their jailers, for better conditions in Gaza, a blockaded territory Palestinian see as an open-air prison. The strategy seemed to work. Israel gave Gaza economic incentives, coveted Israeli work permits for thousands of Gaza laborers. Eyal Hulata, who served as Israel's national security adviser last year, thought this bought Israel some quiet on the Gaza border.
EYAL HULATA: We had an understanding what Sinwar thinking was and this was so wrong.
ESTRIN: The quiet from Gaza was Sinwar's ruse. Israel was shocked on October 7 when Hamas fighters stormed the border, killed about 1,200 people, and dragged back to Gaza more than 200 captives. Sinwar hoped to strike a hostage prisoner exchange and release his old friends from Israeli prisons, still serving life sentences. Sinwar and Israel did exchange some at the beginning of the war. His condition for releasing the rest was ending the war, a condition Israel rejected. Sinwar spent the past year of war avoiding detection, communicating through couriers. Israel said he was deep underground in tunnels. Some released hostages said they met him there. Israel says it has evidence he hid near hostages, presumably, so Israel would avoid killing him.
An Israeli army drone filmed his final moments Thursday. He was in a ruined house, masked, wounded, throwing a stick at the drone before he was killed. Many in Gaza, who criticized Sinwar for launching the war and bringing on Gaza's destruction, said the way he died as a fighter earned their respect. Sinwar talked about his own death in a speech three years ago during the COVID pandemic.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SINWAR: (Non-English language spoken).
ESTRIN: He said, I would rather be martyred by an F-16 or a missile than die from the coronavirus. I don't want to die of a stroke, heart attack, or a traffic accident.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SINWAR: (Non-English language spoken).
ESTRIN: He said, the greatest gift the enemy can give me is to kill me. That is how he met his end this week.
Daniel Estrin, NPR News, Tel Aviv. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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