Yahya Sinwar: A refugee, novelist, strategist, and fighter

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has been killed in an Israeli attack, several media reports quoting Israeli officials said on Thursday.

Israeli Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz and the Israeli army later confirmed the killing of Sinwar, head of the Hamas politburo, in the besieged Palestinian enclave of Gaza.

The news, although yet to be confirmed by Hamas, has spread far and wide, even across Gaza, which has been turned into rubble by Israeli bombardments.

Sami Barhoum, a Gaza-based Palestinian journalist, tells TRT World that “all indications show” that the dead person in question is Sinwar.

62-year-old Sinwar was elected to the top leadership of Hamas after the resistance group’s politburo chief Ismael Haniyeh was assassinated by Israel in Tehran on July 31.

While Sinwar was the number one enemy of the Jewish supremacist state, he learned Hebrew during his 23-year imprisonment in Israel’s notorious prisons. He spoke the language fluently.

“He studied Hebrew and he also studied Israeli society. He is well aware of the mentality of Israelis”, said Yousef Alhelou, a Palestinian political analyst, in a previous TRT World interview.

Born in a refugee camp in Khan Younis like many other Palestinians, Sinwar, also known as Abu Ibrahim, narrated his refugee upbringing in his first novel, “The Thorn and Carnation”, which was published two decades ago. His family had been expelled from Ashkelon during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, which is called Nakba (catastrophe) in Palestinian political language.

Sinwar the novelist

While many Israelis and their allies might have a hard time to believe, Sinwar, one of the “human animals” in the words of Zionist leaders, has made immense contributions to Palestinian literature, writing several novels.

In his first novel named the Thorn and Carnation, Sinwar’s main narrator is Ahmed, the youngest grandson of the expelled Palestinian family of the 1948 War. “This is not my personal story, nor is it the story of a specific person, even though all its events are true. Every event in it or every set of events relates to a Palestinian,” Sinwar wrote in the book’s preface from his Beersheba Prison.

“The novel chronicles the family’s struggles — shaped by the disappearance of their father and uncle — the harsh conditions of the refugee camp, and political events spanning 37 years,” wrote Amira Howeidy, a Cairo-based journalist, in an article this month to explain how Sinwar’s personal suffering has been intertwined with general Palestinian suffering.

In Sinwar’s novel, the refugee family’s eldest son joins the secular Fatah movement, while his younger brothers align with religiously-inspired groups like Hamas, which was formed in 1987 almost three decades after Fatah’s establishment. Sinwar joined Hamas in its very early stage.

Sinwar’s novel visits “personal and historical events, documenting key milestones of Palestinian history from 1967 to the early years of the Second Intifada,” wrote Howeidy. The Second Intifada, which is also called the Al-Aqsa Intifada, happened between 2000 and 2005 across occupied Palestinian territories from Gaza to the West Bank.

Sinwar’s portrayal of the two brothers - one joins Fatah, a secular Palestinian resistance, while the other becomes a member of Hamas - also shows that he has considered both movements fighting for the same cause, which is the ultimate liberation from Israeli occupation.

“Sinwar’s detailed narrative of the life he lived in the strip offers compelling insight into the current conflict in Gaza. The parallels demonstrate that Israel’s ongoing war is merely a violent reiteration of the same mechanisms and policies of occupation that have persisted since the time depicted in the novel,” said Howeidy.

“These policies — forced mass displacement, land grabs, massacres and mass arrests — continue to shape Palestinian actions, as they have since 1948.”

In 2010, six years after his first novel, Glory, Sinwar’s second book was published. It is about the Shin Bet, Israel’s General Security Service, which has played a central role in Palestinian lives and Zionist state’s continuance of its occupation, carrying out many assassinations against resistance leaders.

Returning to Gaza

A year after Glory’s publication, which had been produced in prison like The Thorn and Carnation, Sinwar gained his relative freedom thanks to a prisoner swap deal between Israel and Hamas.

After his release, Sinwar returned to Gaza, which has also gained relative freedom after the Israeli military’s withdrawal from the Palestinian enclave in 2005 under former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon leadership. Gaza has been ruled by Hamas since 2007 while Israel has placed a total siege on the Palestinian enclave.

In early 2010s, he was tasked by Hamas in a role similar to the defence ministry and he met with regional leaders during this time, developing strong ties with Hezbollah, which has eventually led to a rapprochement between the two groups.

In 2017, he became the top military leader of Hamas in Gaza and has led the group’s operations since then. Sinwar has been able to escape several Israeli assassinations.

Many believe that he was the main force behind Hamas’s fateful October 7 attack against Israel, which many historians and intellectuals have described as the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising against the Nazi occupation. Since then, Sinwar has reportedly been in Gaza’s tunnels leading Hamas’s fight against Israel’s brutal attacks, which have dropped countless bombs on the enclave, even overshadowing the WWII Hiroshima tragedy.