Yahya Sinwar

[4][5] Sinwar was born in the Khan Yunis refugee camp in Egyptian-occupied Gaza in 1962 to a family who had been expelled or fled from Majdal 'Asqalan during the 1948 Palestine War.[25] Yahya Ibrahim Hassan al-Sinwar was born on 29 October 1962,[26] in the Khan Yunis refugee camp, when the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian occupation, where he spent his early years.[27] His family were forcibly expelled from Majdal Asqalan (Arabic: مدينة المجدل, romanized: Medīnat al-Majdal),[28] now known as Ashkelon, during the Nakba, and sought refuge in the Gaza Strip.[29] Arrested again in 1985,[5] upon his release he co-founded with Rawhi Mushtaha the Munazzamat al Jihad w'al-Dawa (Majd), an organization that worked, among others, to identify collaborators with Israel among the Palestinian population,[4] which in 1987 became the Hamas "police".Academic expert on Hamas Khaled Hroub said Sinwar is "widely respected as a great organizer", and that claims of his alleged ruthlessness had not been proved.He was arrested on February that year; during questioning he admitted to strangling one of the victims with his bare hands, suffocating another with a keffiyeh,[8] inadvertently killing a third during a violent interrogation, and accidentally shooting the fourth during an attempted abduction, and showed investigators an orchard where the four bodies were buried.Hamas operatives reportedly disposed of the victims' severed body parts by throwing them out of cell doors and telling guards to "take the dog's head."[35] Sinwar, respected for his resourcefulness among fellow inmates, attempted multiple escapes, including digging a hole in his cell floor to tunnel under the prison.He meticulously translated Hebrew autobiographies of former Shin Bet chiefs into Arabic, sharing them with fellow inmates to study counterterrorism tactics."[8] Ma'ariv reported that during his time in prison, Sinwar enrolled in fifteen courses through the Open University of Israel over a span of seven years, beginning in 1995.Committees handle day-to-day decisions and punishments, while an elected "emir" and a high council oversee operations for limited terms.Sinwar asked the Muslim officer guarding him to thank the dentist and to explain to him the significance of his life-saving surgery in Islam and how he felt indebted to him for saving his life.Despite being part of the negotiation team, Sinwar opposed deals that did not include high-profile prisoners, known as "the impossibles", such as those serving multiple life sentences.In an interview with Hamas's Al-Aqsa TV, he expressed determination to continue efforts to free more prisoners, urging the Al-Qassam Brigades to kidnap soldiers for exchanges.[4] Sinwar elevated his former prison associates alongside him, with Rawhi Mushtaha serving as the head of Hamas's Gaza government, and Tawfiq Abu Naim helped him to establish an internal security force feared by locals.[45] Sinwar rejected any reconciliation with Israel,[4] and was said to have been dedicated to its eradication,[13][14] seeing military confrontation as the only path to "liberating Palestine", and saying that this would be achieved "by force, not negotiations".[10] In September 2017, a new round of negotiations with the Palestinian Authority began in Egypt, and Sinwar agreed to dissolve the Hamas administrative committee for Gaza.[46] He was said to have silenced hard-line voices in Gaza, ordering against the use of tunnels that Mohammed Deif wanted to use to sneak fighters into Israel before they were shut down by new classified Israeli technology in 2017.[55] Israeli intelligence presumed Sinwar was hiding in a complex system of tunnels beneath Gaza and was surrounded by hostages acting as human shields.IDF spokesperson noted that Israeli forces had come close to capturing him on multiple occasions during the war, but he consistently managed to evade them, primarily hiding underground between Khan Yunis and Rafah.[66] On 13 February the IDF released CCTV footage dated 10 October showing Sinwar and his wife and children as well as his brother Ibrahim in a Hamas tunnel complex in Khan Younis.[71] Ghazi Hamad, a Hamas spokesperson, refuted the report, asserting that Sinwar never made such comments and was instead focused on ending the conflict swiftly, calling the circulated statements "completely incorrect".Per Hamas officials, he was elected due to his considerable popularity in the Arab and Islamic worlds following the October 7 attacks and his strong connections with the "Axis of Resistance", a network of armed groups led by Iran.[18] According to The Wall Street Journal, his election suggests that the movement endorsed his strategy of waging war against Israel in conjunction with Iran's militia allies, also noting that Sinwar had gained increasing popularity among Palestinians due to his approach in handling the conflict.[17] The IDF Military Intelligence Directorate announced in September that they had begun an investigation into Sinwar's possible death in an airstrike after noting that he had not been heard from for some time.[102][103] On 2 November, sources close to Hamas told the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat that "shortly before his death, Sinwar and those with him suffered from limited access to food, especially during the last three days when they did not eat at all.