Yahya Sinwar Gaza Hamas Leader History
YahyaSinwarGazaHamasLeaderHistory
Yahya Sinwar the shadowy Hamas leader behind the war against Israel
- In full: Yaḥyā Ibrāhīm Ḥasan al-Sinwār
- Born: October 29, 1962, Khan Younis refugee camp, Gaza Strip (age 61 as at 2024)
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Another Over 100 People Murdered And Injured By Israeli Air Strike In Gaza 27th May 2024
Hamas escape: How Netanyahu had the chance to kill Yahya Sinwar six times
The plan to assassinate Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, presented to Netanyahu, was detailed and ready for execution but was ultimately rejected by the prime minister.
In an Israeli prison infirmary, a Jewish dentist came to the aid of a desperately ill Hamas inmate. Years later, the prisoner became a mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack.
IDF airs footage of Hamas chief Sinwar in Khan Younis tunnel: ‘The hunt will not stop’
Yahya Sinwar And Family Escape Gaza To Egypt Through Gaza Tunnels 10th October 2023
Mr. Sinwar in his prison cell with fellow inmates in 2006.Credit...Keshet 12 News
In the last 24 hours from 24th May 2023 to 25th May 2024 it has been reported that the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. and others have ordered Israel's Defense Force to murder over 51 Palestinians, which included children who were seeking safe refuge in a school in Gaza .... even though the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, are both well aware that an application has been made by the ICC's chief Prosecutor Karim Asad Ahmad Khan, to the International Criminal Court , for arrest warrants to be issued against them both, for allegedly ordering the murder and injury of in excess of 100,000 innocent Palestinian Civilians, with over two thirds being women, children and the elderly, and using starvation of the whole of the Palestinian Population in Gaza as a Weapon of War ....... with both the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, well knowing that such serious crimes are a clear breach of International Law.
Karim Asad Ahmad Khan KC (born 30 March 1970) is a British lawyer specialising in international criminal law and international human rights law, who has served as Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court since 2021.
IDF airs footage of Hamas chief Sinwar in Khan Younis tunnel: ‘The hunt will not stop’
It is quite fraudulent for the Israel Government, Israel's War Politicians, Shin Bet, Mossad and the IDF to claim that Hamas Gaza Military leader Yahya Sinwar is still in Gaza hiding in tunnels under Rafah. using this as a false manufactured excuse to explode more bombs in Rafah and elsewhere in Gaza, killing more and more innocent women, children and men, including the old and sick civilians in Gaza .... looking for Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar or trying to assassinate Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar
INL News Group Secret Investigation Report into the Israel Hamas Gaza War indicates clearly that Israel, the IDF and Mossad, well know that Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar , is no longer in Gaza or under Gaza in Tunnels, shown in INL News Group's Secret Investigation Report into the Israel, Hamas, Gaza War, and also as shown in this above photo taken from the video released by the IDF, showing that the IDF authorised and allowed Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar to safely leave Gaza on 10th October, 2023
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Hamas leader Sinwar plotted Israel's most deadly day in plain sight | Reuters
Hamas Leader Yahya Sinwar's Strategic Assets: Ben-Gvir and Smotrich - Opinion - Haaretz.com
Has Sinwar fled to Egypt?
The're Killing Women And Children In Gaza Music and Live Gaza Film Version Two
A song written for everyone to sing around the world in support and memory of the
over 35,000 innocent Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank murdered by Israel's IDF and over 80 ,000 Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank badly injured by Israel's IDF under direct orders of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant
and they both wonder why the main ICC prosecutor has asked the ICC to issue bench warrants against them serious war crimes .... it seems that the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant seem to be suffering the same mental disease as the Directors of Eron suffered ... That is Willful Blindness
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9eev88xy59o
A Palestinian man carries a child wounded during an Israeli bombardment in Rafah, on the southern Gaza Strip, on Saturday.
Israel says it has hit more than 400 targets in Gaza since end of truce with Hamas
TEL AVIV, Israel — The Israeli military says it attacked more than 400 targets throughout Gaza in the 24 hours since the end of a week-long cease-fire with Hamas sparked a resumption of combat operations.
The Israel Defense Forces released video and photos of Israeli soldiers conducting ground operations and aerial footage showing airstrikes on buildings and infrastructure. One video, that appeared to target a human figure walking in a street, was described by the IDF as "a strike on terrorists" in western Jabalia, an area in Gaza's north.
In a statement, the IDF said that air force fighter jets had struck more than 50 targets around Khan Younis, a city in the southern part of the Gaza Strip.
A picture taken from southern Israel near the border with the Gaza Strip on Saturday shows smoke billowing over the Palestinian territory as a result of Israel's bombardment of the Palestinian territory
Yahya Sinwar, 61, widely known as Abu Ibrahim, was born in the Khan Younis refugee camp at the southern end of the Gaza Strip
The heavy bombardment and ground operations across Gaza killed nearly 200 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more in the first day of resumed fighting, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-controlled Gaza
Workers rush injured people to Mohammed Yousef al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah as Israel resumed its bombing Friday morning in the Gaza Strip.
TEL AVIV, Israel — Israel's warplanes began pounding targets in Gaza early Friday, shortly after the collapse of a cease-fire deal that had allowed the release of more than 100 hostages seized by Hamas militants and nearly 250 Palestinians from Israeli jails.
By mid-afternoon, Israel had already launched more than 200 airstrikes across the territory, the Israeli military said, including in Rafah and Khan Younis, the south's two largest cities where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the north have sought shelter.
Health officials in Gaza reported 178 deaths and nearly 600 injuries in the renewed bombardment Friday.
Airstrikes in Rafah, near the Egyptian border, began just after 7 a.m. local time. One struck an apartment building near an open market.
A mural depicting late Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin
Sinwar's reputation for ruthlessness and violence earned him the nickname of The Butcher of Khan Younis.
Sinwar (centre) at Egypt border in 2017
Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas militant group's leader in the Gaza Strip, speaks to international press, including NPR, in Gaza City on Nov. 21, 2018
9,088 "Security" Inmates Are Held In Prisons Inside Israel
As of May 2024 Israel holds 2,072 sentenced prisoners, 2,727 remand detainees and 3,424 administrative detainees held without trial. Israel also holds 865 people as "unlawful combatants"*.
https://hamoked.org/prisoners-charts.php
Newly released Palestinian prisoners are surrounded by supporters in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank early Thursday.
Yahya Sinwar: Who is the Hamas leader in Gaza?
Yahya Sinwar has disappeared. Hardly surprising when thousands of Israeli troops backed by drones, electronic eavesdropping devices and human informants, are all trying to discover his whereabouts.
Portraits of Israeli children hostages displayed at a rally in Tel Aviv
A gunman guards the stage as Sinwar addresses a rally in 2021
This picture taken from southern Israel near the border with the Gaza Strip shows a rocket being fired from inside the Gaza Strip towards Israel, as battles resumed between the Israeli forces and Hamas militants, on Friday.
Palestinians inspect the destruction following an Israeli airstrike on the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip on Friday.
At Mohammed Yousef al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah, Palestinians mourned children and relatives from four different families killed in Rafah as Israel resumed its bombing campaign Friday morning in the Gaza Strip.
EU adds Hamas chief in Gaza Yahya Sinwar to terror blacklist
https://www.timesofisrael.com/
Hamas escape: How Netanyahu had the chance to kill Yahya Sinwar six times
The plan to assassinate Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, presented to Netanyahu, was detailed and ready for execution but was ultimately rejected by the prime minister.
https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/gaza-news/article-775527
Yahya Sinwar leader of the Palestinian Hamas Islamist movement speaks during a meeting with members of the the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian Hamas movement, in Gaza City, on April 30, 2022
An operational plan to eliminate the leader of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, has been presented to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at least six times in recent years. This information has been gathered through conversations with numerous senior figures in the security establishment, both past and present.
This wasn't merely a theoretical proposal but a well-thought-out and actionable plan that could be put into motion at any given moment. Notably, Sinwar doesn't spend most of his time in hiding; he maintains a visible presence and doesn't move between secret apartments or bunkers, unlike Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who has followed such practices since 2006.
From Netanyahu's perspective, this information is of the utmost secrecy.
Yahya Sinwar Gaza Strip chief of the Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement, waves to Palestinians during a rally to mark the annual al-Quds Day (Jerusalem Day), in Gaza, April 14, 2023.
The plan to eliminate Sinwar was put forward to Netanyahu by the three most recent heads of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) during their respective tenures: Yoram Cohen, Nadav Argaman, and the current head, Ronen Bar.
This plan was highly detailed and included various contingency scenarios, making it capable of targeting any senior Hamas figure in Gaza, not just Sinwar. It resembled operations like Operation Orchard (an Israeli airstrike on a suspected nuclear reactor in Syria) or Operation Bramble (an Israeli plan to assassinate Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in 1992) during the First Lebanon War.
Former Shin Bet head Cohen had previously revealed in the Meet the Press program that the agency had recommended conducting an "airlift" operation targeting all of Hamas's leaders in Gaza. He even mentioned that he and his successors continued to propose this to senior government officials. The Shin Bet viewed Hamas as a terrorist organization that needed to be neutralized due to the significant threat posed by its agenda. However, as mentioned earlier, Netanyahu rejected all of these operational opportunities.
IDF airs footage of Hamas chief Sinwar in Khan Younis tunnel: ‘The hunt will not stop’
IDF airs footage of Hamas chief Sinwar in Khan Younis tunnel: ‘The hunt will not stop’
It is quite fraudulent for the Israel Government, Israel's War Politicians, Shin Bet, Mossad and the IDF to claim that Hamas Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar is still in Gaza hiding in tunnels under Rafah. using this as a false manufactured excuse to explode more bombs in Rafah and elsewhere in Gaza, killing more and more innocent women, children and men, including the old and sick civilians in Gaza .... looking for Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar or trying to assassinate Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar
INL News Group Secret Investigation Report into the Israel Hamas Gaza War indicates clearly that Israel, the IDF and Mossad, well know that Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar , is no longer in Gaza or under Gaza in Tunnels, shown in INL News Group's Secret Investigation Report into the Israel, Hamas, Gaza War, and also as shown in this above photo taken from the video released by the IDF, showing that the IDF authorised and allowed Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar to safely leave Gaza on 10th October, 2023
IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari in a press conference airs footage showing Hamas’s Gaza Strip leader Yahya Sinwar in a tunnel in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis.
He says the video, obtained from a surveillance camera, was filmed on October 10, three days after the October 7 Hamas massacre.
The footage shows a man, Sinwar’s brother Ibrahim, leading the Hamas chief, along with his wife and children, through the tunnel passage.
IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari in a press conference airs footage showing Hamas’s Gaza Strip leader Yahya Sinwar in a tunnel in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis.
He says the video, obtained from a surveillance camera, was filmed on October 10, three days after the October 7 Hamas massacre.
The footage shows a man, Sinwar’s brother Ibrahim, leading the Hamas chief, along with his wife and children, through the tunnel passage.
IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari in a press conference airs footage showing Hamas’s Gaza Strip leader Yahya Sinwar in a tunnel in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis.
He says the video, obtained from a surveillance camera, was filmed on October 10, three days after the October 7 Hamas massacre.
The footage shows a man, Sinwar’s brother Ibrahim, leading the Hamas chief, along with his wife and children, through the tunnel passage.
The surveillance camera footage showed “the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the chief murderer Yahya Sinwar fleeing with his children and one of his wives through the network of tunnels,” he says.
“In the footage, which was taken on October 10, at the beginning of the war, he escaped with his family underground to one of the safe accommodation complexes he had built in advance,” Hagari says.
“We are determined to capture him – and we will capture him.”
“Following searches, we arrived at the compound where he was staying with other senior officials, hiding underground, while the war was going on above him.”
“Senior Hamas officials resided in the compound in good conditions. They have food and bathrooms, along with safes with personal funds of millions of shekels and dollars in cash.”
The tunnel is part of a major network of passages raided by the IDF under a cemetery in the Bani Suheila area of Khan Younis.
Hagari says the tunnels contained “bedrooms of senior Hamas officials and the office of the commander of the Khan Younis Brigade’s Eastern Battalion, from where he directed the attack on October 7.”
Hagari says the network also connects to tunnels where hostages were held, which the IDF published details on in recent weeks.
He says special forces raided another part of the tunnel, tens of meters below ground, where the footage was found.
“One video or another is not what really matters. What is important is the intelligence that will allow us to reach senior Hamas officials and the hostages. The hunt for Sinwar will not stop, until we catch him, dead or alive,” Hagari says.
He also says that earlier this month troops detained close relatives of senior Hamas military commanders and of Sinwar.
He says that among those detained are the father of Rafa’a Salameh, the commander of Hamas’s Rafah Brigade, and the son of Husni Hamdan, another senior Hamas commander.
“In the Shin Bet interrogations, they are providing us with a lot of intelligence,” Hagari says.
Hagari says the IDF was “close to dismantling the military framework of Hamas in Khan Younis. We continue to catch terrorists, interrogate them… and reveal more and more intelligence. The most important thing for us in intelligence is information about the hostages, in order to make decisions and prepare operations such as the rescue operation that we carried out last
The Hamas Chief and the Israeli Who Saved Yahya Sinwar's Life
night.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/26/world/middleeast/hamas-sinwar-israel-doctor-prison-swap.html
In an Israeli prison infirmary, a Jewish dentist came to the aid of a desperately ill Hamas inmate. Years later, the prisoner became a mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack.
- By Jo Becker and
Jo Becker reported from Tel Aviv, and Adam Sella from Nir Oz, Israel. Since the early days of the Israel-Hamas war, they have traced the aftereffects of a fateful encounter between Yahya Sinwar and Dr. Yuval Bitton.
This is how Dr. Yuval Bitton remembers the morning of Oct. 7. Being jolted awake just after sunrise by the insistent ringing of his phone. The frantic voice of his daughter, who was traveling abroad, asking, “Dad, what’s happened in Israel? Turn on the TV.”
News anchors were still piecing together the reports: Palestinian gunmen penetrating Israel’s vaunted defenses, infiltrating more than 20 towns and military bases, killing approximately 1,200 people and dragging more than 240 men, women and children into Gaza as hostages.
Even in that first moment, Dr. Bitton says, he knew with certainty who had masterminded the attack: Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza and Inmate No. 7333335 in the Israeli prison system from 1989 until his release in a prisoner swap in 2011.
But that was not all. Dr. Bitton had a history with Yahya Sinwar.
As he watched the images of terror and death flicker across his screen, he was tormented by a decision he had made nearly two decades before — how, working in a prison infirmary, he had come to the aid of a mysteriously and desperately ill Mr. Sinwar, and how afterward the Hamas leader had told him that “he owed me his life.”
The two men had then formed a relationship of sorts, sworn enemies who nevertheless showed a wary mutual respect. As a dentist and later as a senior intelligence officer for the Israeli prison service, Dr. Bitton had spent hundreds of hours talking with and analyzing Mr. Sinwar, who in the seven months since Oct. 7 has eluded Israel’s forces even as their assault on Gaza has killed tens of thousands and turned much of the enclave to rubble. Now American officials believe Mr. Sinwar is calling the shots for Hamas in negotiations over a deal for a cease-fire and the release of some of the hostages.
Dr. Bitton saw that, in a sense, everything that had passed between himself and Mr. Sinwar was a premonition of the events now coming to pass. He understood the way Mr. Sinwar’s mind worked as well as or better than any Israeli official. He knew from experience that the price the Hamas leader would demand for the hostages might well be one Israel would be unwilling to pay.
And by day’s end, he knew something else: Mr. Sinwar’s operatives had his nephew.
“During the day you would treat them and at night you come home and cry,” he said. “That happened many, many nights. Once there was a suicide attack near where my parents lived. Sixteen Jews were killed. Who would not cry at night? When you see a small baby being lifted, who wouldn’t cry?”
He tried to compartmentalize. He told himself that as a doctor he was bound by his oath to do no harm. And on particularly bad days, he said, he would remind himself of the words that Israel’s primary architect, David Ben-Gurion, had made his mantra in the years after the nation’s founding: “The State of Israel will be judged not by its wealth, nor by its army, nor by its technology, but by its moral character and human values.”
While some Israeli historians question whether Ben-Gurion always lived by those words, Dr. Bitton took them to heart. It was, he thought, what differentiated him from the prisoners he treated.
PRISON, MR. SINWAR once told an Italian journalist, is a crucible. “Prison builds you,” he said, gives you time to think about what you believe in — “and the price you are willing to pay” for it.
His rite of passage had begun in 1989, two years after the first intifada erupted, protesting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He was 27, with a reputation for extreme brutality, convicted of murdering four Palestinians whom Hamas suspected of collaborating with Israel.
He was born in a refugee camp in southern Gaza, where his parents had been forced to live after what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe, when they were displaced from their homes during the wars surrounding the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. In conversations with fellow prisoners, Mr. Sinwar spoke of how his refugee childhood had led him to Hamas.
“Something he always remembered is that all the men in the camp would go to one bathroom, and the women to another,” said Esmat Mansour, a fellow prisoner held from 1993 to 2013 for killing an Israeli settler. “There was a daily line and you had to wait. And how they distributed food and the humiliation they would undergo. It isn’t something special to him, but it apparently impacted him a lot.”
Mr. Sinwar had been recruited by Hamas’s founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who made him chief of an internal security unit known as Al Majd. His job was to find and punish those suspected of violating Islamic morality laws or cooperating with the Israeli occupiers.
In an interrogation after his arrest in 1988, he dispassionately described shooting one man, strangling another with his bare hands, suffocating a third with a kaffiyeh, and choking and punching a fourth before tossing him in a hastily dug grave. Records of the interrogation make clear that, far from being remorseful, Mr. Sinwar saw beating confessions out of the collaborators as a righteous duty. One of them, he told interrogators, had even said that “he realized he deserved to die.”
Mr. Sinwar continued his campaign against informants from behind bars. Israeli authorities believed he had ordered the beheadings of at least two prisoners he suspected of snitching. Hamas operatives would throw their severed body parts out of the cell doors and tell the guards to “take the dog’s head,” Dr. Bitton said.
But if Mr. Sinwar was feared by his fellow inmates, he was also respected for his resourcefulness. He tried to escape several times, once surreptitiously digging a hole in his cell floor in hopes of tunneling under the prison and exiting through the visitor center. And he found ways to plot against Israel with Hamas leaders on the outside, managing the smuggling of cellphones into the prison and using lawyers and visitors to ferry messages out.
Often, the message was about finding ways to kidnap Israeli soldiers to trade for Palestinian prisoners. Years later, Mr. Sinwar would say that “for the prisoner, capturing an Israeli soldier is the best news in the universe, because he knows that a glimmer of hope has been opened for him.”
“They were formative years,” Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official who serves as an informal spokesman, said in an interview. “He developed a leadership personality in every sense of the word.”
He also became fluent in Hebrew, taking advantage of an online university program, and devoured Israeli news, to better understand his enemy. A routine search of his cell yielded tens of thousands of pages of painstakingly handwritten Arabic — Mr. Sinwar’s translations of contraband Hebrew-language autobiographies written by the former heads of Israel’s domestic security agency, Shin Bet. According to Dr. Bitton, Mr. Sinwar surreptitiously shared the translated pages so other inmates could study the agency’s counterterrorism tactics. He liked to call himself a “specialist in the Jewish people’s history.”
“They wanted prison to be a grave for us, a mill to grind our will, determination and bodies,” Mr. Sinwar once told supporters. “But, thank God, with our belief in our cause we turned the prison into sanctuaries of worship and academies for study.”
Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, elects its leaders democratically, and that structure was mirrored behind bars. In each prison, one committee was charged with making quotidian decisions — who slept in the top bunk, what to watch during allotted TV hours — while another meted out punishments to suspected collaborators, and still others oversaw things like divvying up money sent by Hamas leaders that could be used to purchase food at the commissary.
An elected “emir,” along with members of a high council called the “haya,” ruled over this structure for limited terms. For much of Mr. Sinwar’s time in prison, he alternated as emir with Rawhi Mushtaha, a confidant who had been convicted alongside him for killing collaborators. It was Mr. Sinwar’s turn in 2004.
Mr. Sinwar, second from left, at prayer time with other inmates at the Beersheba prison complex in 2006.Credit...Keshet 12 News
AT THE TIME, the episode seemed of little consequence. After all, Dr. Bitton said, Mr. Sinwar was supposed to be serving four life terms.
As a dentist in Israel, Dr. Bitton had also trained in general medicine, and was often called upon to assist the three other prison doctors, stitching up wounds or helping with a tricky diagnosis. So when he emerged from seeing his dental patients that day in early 2004 to find several clearly perplexed colleagues surrounding a disoriented Mr. Sinwar, Dr. Bitton did what a doctor does. He joined them.
“What’s going on?” he asked the prisoner.
The two men had met on a number of occasions. Dr. Bitton often wandered back to the prisoners’ wings, partly out of curiosity about how some of Israel’s most fervent enemies thought, and partly because the trust he engendered as a doctor made him a useful intermediary when prison administrators wanted to know what was going on. Just as Mr. Sinwar had learned Hebrew, Dr. Bitton had taught himself Arabic. He became such a regular presence in the cellblocks that some prisoners suspected, wrongly, that he might be an intelligence plant.
Israeli and Palestinian watchdog groups have periodically published scathing reports on conditions for Palestinian prisoners — overcrowded cells lacking proper sanitation and ventilation, harsh interrogations and, in some cases, years of solitary confinement and withholding of proper medical care.
Against that backdrop, Mr. Mansour said, Dr. Bitton stood out. “He treated us like humans.”
“He bought the hearts of the prisoners, truly. He would go into their cells, drink with them and eat with them,” he said. “If there was a problem, he would call and help.”
Lately Dr. Bitton had been working to persuade Mr. Sinwar and others to cooperate with Israeli researchers studying suicide bombings. But in the examining room, Mr. Sinwar didn’t seem to know him.
“Who are you?” Dr. Bitton recalled him asking.
“It’s me, Yuval.”
“Wow, I’m sorry — I didn’t recognize you,” Dr. Bitton said the prisoner replied, before describing his symptoms.
He would stand for prayer and then fall. As he spoke, he seemed to drift in and out of consciousness. But for Dr. Bitton, the most telling sign was Mr. Sinwar’s complaint of a pain in the back of his neck. Something is wrong with his brain, the dentist told his colleagues, perhaps a stroke or an abscess. He needed to go to the hospital, urgently.
He was rushed to the nearby Soroka Medical Center, where doctors performed emergency surgery to remove a malignant and aggressive brain tumor, fatal if left untreated. “If he had not been operated on, it would have burst,” Dr. Bitton said.
A few days later, Dr. Bitton visited Mr. Sinwar in the hospital, together with a prison officer sent to check the security arrangements. They found the prisoner in bed, hooked up to monitors and an IV, but awake. Mr. Sinwar asked the officer, who was Muslim, to thank the dentist.
“Sinwar asked him to explain to me what it means in Islam that I saved his life,” Dr. Bitton recalled. “It was important to him that I understood from a Muslim how important this was in Islam — that he owed me his life.”
Mr. Sinwar in his prison cell with fellow inmates in 2006.Credit...Keshet 12 News
MR. SINWAR RARELY if ever spoke to the Israeli prison authorities. But now he began meeting regularly with the dentist, to drink tea and talk.
They would meet back in the cellblocks, two men with strikingly similar features — cropped, prematurely graying hair; dark, quizzically arched eyebrows; high cheekbones. Dr. Bitton, a loquacious, easygoing man, often joshed with the other prisoners, getting them to open up about their families or sports. But with Mr. Sinwar, the talk was all business and dogma.
“The conversations with Sinwar were not personal or emotional,” he said. “They were only about Hamas.”
Mr. Sinwar knew the Quran by heart, and he coolly laid out his organization’s governing doctrines.
“Hamas sees the land we live on as the holy land, like, ‘This is ours, you don’t have a right to live in this land,’” Dr. Bitton said. “It wasn’t political, it was religious.”
Was there no chance, then, for a two-state solution? Dr. Bitton would press him.
Never, Mr. Sinwar would say. Why not? Dr. Bitton would respond.
Because this is the land of Muslims, not for you — I can’t sign away this land.
In a search of his cell, guards had confiscated a handwritten novel that Mr. Sinwar finished at the end of 2004, after the surgery. “You couldn’t make a Hollywood movie about it,” Dr. Bitton laughed. “But it was about the relationship between men, women and the family in Islam.” At least one copy was smuggled out; The New York Times found a typed PDF in an online library.
The novel, “The Thorn and the Carnation,” is a coming-of-age story that limns Mr. Sinwar’s own life: The narrator, a devout Gazan boy named Ahmed, emerges from hiding during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war to a life under Israeli occupation. In their cruelty, the occupiers cause the “chests of youth to boil like a cauldron.” In retaliation, Ahmed’s friends and family attack them with knives, ambush them with Molotov cocktails and hunt collaborators so as to “gouge out the eyes that the occupier sees us with from the inside.”
“The Thorn and the Carnation,” a coming-of-age novel that Mr. Sinwar wrote in prison.
Woven throughout is the theme of the unending sacrifice demanded by the resistance. At university, where he is recruited to Hamas, Ahmed becomes infatuated with a woman he sees walking to and from class. “I am not exaggerating when I say that she truly surpasses the full moon,” he says. Yet their relationship, chaste and proper according to Muslim values, never develops; the reader never even learns the woman’s name.
“I decided to end my love story, if it can even be called a love story,” the narrator says. “I realized that ours is the bitter story of Palestine, for which there is only room for one love … one passion.”
But if Mr. Sinwar, unmarried at the time, ever entertained the notion of an alternative path for himself, he did not share his thoughts with Dr. Bitton. (Indeed, even after his release from prison and subsequent marriage, he has said very little publicly on the subject of his own family, except to note that “the first words my son spoke were ‘father,’ ‘mother’ and ‘drone.’”)
At Beersheba, Mr. Sinwar was unquestionably a prison chieftain, Dr. Bitton said, but he didn’t put on airs — a humble ascetic who shared cooking duties and other chores with more junior inmates.
Every week or so, he would make an improvised knafeh, a Palestinian dessert of sweet cheese and shredded pastry drenched in syrup. The prisoners always awaited his knafeh, Dr. Bitton said. They really liked it — and so did Dr. Bitton, who understood the breaking of bread together as a way to cultivate the relationship.
“I tried it,” he allowed. “Listen, they know how to make knafeh.”
Dr. Bitton was under no illusion about whom he was dealing with. A prison assessment that Dr. Bitton said he helped compile called Mr. Sinwar cruel, cunning and manipulative, an authoritative man with “the ability to carry crowds” who “keeps secrets even inside prison amongst other prisoners.”
Still, there was a certain transactional honesty to their conversations. Each man knew the other had an agenda.
Just as Dr. Bitton probed to better understand the schisms between Hamas and the other Palestinian factions inside the prison, Mr. Sinwar returned again and again to the fissures in Israeli society that he read about in the Hebrew news media, between rich and poor and Sephardic and Ashkenazi and secular and orthodox Jews.
“Now you’re strong, you have 200 atomic warheads,” Mr. Sinwar would say. “But we’ll see, maybe in another 10 to 20 years you’ll weaken, and I’ll attack.”
In 2006, after Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas stunned political observers by winning the largest number of seats in the Palestinian Authority’s legislative elections.
Israeli authorities, worried that the election would help legitimize a group that the United States and European Union had designated a terrorist organization, devised a plan to remind the world of Hamas’s true colors by giving some of its incarcerated leaders a media platform on “60 Minutes” and in an interview with Israeli television. Dr. Bitton was tasked with selling the idea to Mr. Sinwar, who would have to sign off.
“Speak freely, you can say whatever you want about Israel,” Dr. Bitton told Mr. Sinwar and other prisoners.
The plan worked, from Dr. Bitton’s perspective. When Abdullah Barghouti, who had organized suicide bombings that killed 66 people, was asked on “60 Minutes” whether he regretted his deeds, he readily answered yes. “I feel bad, ’cause the number only 66,” he said.
Mr. Sinwar, for his part, tried to use his first and only interview with an Israeli television outlet to send a savvier message. With Dr. Bitton looking on, he told the interviewer that Israelis should “be scared” about Hamas’s election victory. But, he added in comments that weren’t aired, much depended on what the Israeli government did next. “From our perspective, we have a right that we’re asking from the Israeli leadership,” he said. “We aren’t asking for the town.”
The next year, to great alarm in Israel, Hamas wrested full control over Gaza in a violent power struggle with Fatah, a secular rival political party.
This was the time, Dr. Bitton decided, to channel the relationships he had built with Mr. Sinwar and other imprisoned Palestinian leaders into a new role, one that would not leave him feeling so conflicted. He applied to become an officer in the Prison Intelligence Service, and after a short course was assigned to Ketziot prison in 2008. The man who “doesn’t understand the motives and roots of their enemy,” he explained, “will not be able to prevent those organizations from doing what they want.”
Mr. Sinwar, newly released from prison in 2011, on a bus bound for Gaza.
DR. BITTON WAS quickly thrown into a monumental challenge. Two years earlier, in 2006, an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, had been kidnapped in a daring cross-border raid. Among his captors was none other than Mr. Sinwar’s brother.
The kidnapping profoundly shook Israeli society, with its credo that not a single soldier should be left behind. As the Israeli government, working through a back channel with a team of international intermediaries, attempted to negotiate a prisoner swap, Dr. Bitton was tasked with using his connections to imprisoned Hamas leaders to glean intelligence on what they would accept.
By 2009, Israel had agreed in principle to exchange 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for Mr. Shalit. Mr. Sinwar “was managing the negotiations from inside the prison with a group of brothers who were also with him,” according to Ghazi Hamad, the informal Hamas spokesman, who was involved in the negotiations.
There was only one problem: Despite being on the list himself, Mr. Sinwar didn’t think the deal was good enough, according to Gerhard Conrad, a retired German intelligence officer involved in brokering the Shalit deal.
Mr. Sinwar was insisting on freeing “the so-called impossibles,” Mr. Conrad said. Those were the men serving multiple life sentences, men like Mr. Barghouti and Abbas al-Sayed, who had masterminded the Passover suicide attack that had killed 30 people at the Park Hotel.
Saleh al-Arouri, a founder of Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, and a leader of prisoners from the West Bank, approached Dr. Bitton. Would he help push against Mr. Sinwar’s obstinacy?
Mr. al-Arouri “understood they had to compromise — that we would not release everyone,” Dr. Bitton said. “He was more pragmatic.”
Recognizing that the rift between Mr. Sinwar and Mr. al-Arouri could potentially be used to advance the Shalit negotiations, Dr. Bitton got his bosses to sign off on a plan aimed at deepening the division. At Mr. al-Arouri’s request, prison officials brought together 42 influential West Bank inmates from three separate prisons so that Mr. al-Arouri could win them to his side.
But pressuring Mr. Sinwar turned out to be much harder.
The captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2009, two years before he was freed in the prisoner swap that included Mr. Sinwar.
Dr. Bitton saw what he was up against in 2010, when, amid the stalled Shalit negotiations, Mr. Sinwar tried to compel all 1,600 Hamas prisoners to join a hunger strike that would have left many of them dead. The goal wasn’t even to free prisoners, just to release two from long-term solitary confinement. In that moment, Dr. Bitton said, he realized there would never be a Shalit deal as long as Mr. Sinwar remained in the way.
“He was willing to pay a heavy price for principle,” Dr. Bitton said, “even if the price wasn’t proportional to the goal.”
Even after the Shalit negotiators managed to convince the Israelis in 2011 to release additional prisoners, bringing the total to 1,027 — including some, though not nearly all of the “impossibles” — Mr. Sinwar remained opposed.
But by this point, Mr. al-Arouri had been released from prison and was a member of the Hamas negotiating team, led by Ahmad al-Jabari, a top commander who had led the raid that captured Mr. Shalit. Under pressure from Egyptian mediators, the team concluded that this was as good a deal as they were going to get.
Mr. Sinwar’s authority had been diluted. But just to be sure, the Israelis put him in solitary confinement until the deal was done. (Mr. al-Arouri was killed in an Israeli airstrike this past January.)
On Oct. 18, 2011, Dr. Bitton stood in the yard of Ketziot prison, watching as Mr. Sinwar boarded a bus to Gaza. Having witnessed the persuasive power of Mr. Sinwar’s leadership up close, Dr. Bitton said he had urged the negotiators not to free him. But he was overruled, he said, because Mr. Sinwar “didn’t have as much Jewish blood on his hands” as some of the others.
“I thought you need to look at the capabilities of the prisoner to use their abilities against Israel and not just what he did — his potential,” Dr. Bitton said.
In news video footage from that day, Mr. Sinwar does not look all that pleased either, scowling on a makeshift stage in central Gaza City as Ismail Haniyeh, then leader of Hamas in Gaza, gleefully waves to the thousands gathered to celebrate the prisoners’ release. Hours later, in an interview with Hamas’s al-Aqsa TV, a defiant Mr. Sinwar made a promise.
“We shall spare no efforts to liberate the rest of our brothers and sisters,” he said. “We urge the Qassam Brigades to kidnap more soldiers to exchange them for the freedom of our loved ones who are still behind bars.”
“He told us what he was going to do,” Dr. Bitton said. “We didn’t want to listen.”
ABOUT 6:30 A.M. on Oct. 7, Dr. Bitton’s nephew, Tamir Adar, woke up in Nir Oz, a kibbutz less than two miles from the Gaza border. Mr. Adar, 38, worked as a farmer, and he normally rose early so that he would have time to enjoy the long summer afternoons, drinking beer as he watched his daughter and son splash around in the community pool.
That morning, as air raid sirens blared, rockets pierced the sky and sporadic gunfire ricocheted off walls, Mr. Adar left his wife and children in their house’s small safe room and went out to join the kibbutz’s armed emergency response team.
At 8:30 a.m., he sent his wife a WhatsApp message: She should not open the safe-room door, not even if he came pleading to be let in. The kibbutz had been overrun.
At 4 p.m., soldiers finally arrived and called residents out of their safe rooms. Mr. Adar was nowhere to be found. His mother, Yael, called her brother, Dr. Bitton: “Tamir has disappeared.”
Roughly 100 Nir Oz residents — a quarter of the population — had been killed or kidnapped in the Hamas raid. The world quickly knew that Mr. Adar’s paternal grandmother, 85-year-old Yaffa Adar, was among them, as viral video showed armed militants carrying her to Gaza in a stolen golf cart. It would be three weeks before Israeli officials could confirm that Mr. Adar had been taken hostage, too.
Before, his mother worked as the administrator for a school district near the Gaza border. Now she gave herself over to the hostages’ cause, attending marches and demonstrations to pressure the government into striking a deal with Hamas for their release.
“One day you’re hopeful and the next in despair,” she said. “One day you’re crying and the next you’re able to gather yourself.”
She wondered whether she should ask her brother to leverage his connections, but decided against it. “What could I tell him?” she said. “Call Sinwar?”
In the years since the Shalit deal, Dr. Bitton had climbed the ranks of the Israeli Prison Service, becoming the head of its intelligence division and then a deputy commander overseeing 12 prisons before retiring in 2021. Mr. Sinwar had traced a parallel arc. After his release, he was elected to a role akin to Hamas defense minister. And in 2017, he was elected leader of Hamas in Gaza, overseeing all aspects of life on the Strip.
It hadn’t escaped Dr. Bitton’s notice that the Hamas assault came at a time of deep division in Israel, the nation wracked by protests over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts, demanded by the right-wing parties crucial to his political survival, to dilute the power of Israel’s Supreme Court. It was precisely the type of schism that Mr. Sinwar had spoken of years before at Beersheba, when he said he would attack at a time of internal strife.
Dr. Bitton held small hope for his nephew’s release. For Mr. Sinwar, the hostages were a means to an end — freeing the Palestinian prisoners left behind in the Shalit deal and putting the Palestinian cause back on the world stage. Even if Mr. Sinwar knew who his nephew was, Dr. Bitton said, “at the end he looks at us as Jews.”
Still, in one of their last conversations, on the day Mr. Sinwar was freed, the Hamas leader had again thanked him for saving his life. Mr. Sinwar had even asked for his phone number, though Dr. Bitton had to refuse because prison employees are forbidden to communicate with Hamas leaders on the outside. He believed that Mr. Sinwar would feel bound by a kind of code, and that if he was made aware that Hamas held Dr. Bitton’s nephew, he at least would not allow him to be mistreated.
“Beyond the fact that we are enemies, at the end of the day there is also his personal outlook,” Dr. Bitton said. “In my opinion, he would treat him the same way I did, saving his life despite being an enemy.”
Several weeks after the Hamas attack, in the hope that Mr. Sinwar was still an avid follower of Israeli news media, Dr. Bitton decided to give a television interview. In it, he said only that he had been part of a team that had diagnosed Mr. Sinwar decades before, and that his nephew was among the hostages. (In other interviews, he similarly downplayed his role, because, he said, he was worried about how he might be perceived by a nation in mourning.)
In late November, Mr. Adar’s grandmother was released in a weeklong cease-fire deal that saw 105 of the hostages freed, mostly women and children. What Dr. Bitton knew but could not say in his family’s moment of joy was that Mr. Sinwar would hold on to military-age men like Mr. Adar until the very end, to guarantee his own survival.
“Can I tell my sister that they’re releasing Yaffa Adar, Tamir’s grandma, and that that will be the last release and Tamir will remain there? I can’t say it, but I know him and I know what he’ll do,” Dr. Bitton said. “That’s why I stayed silent, but I’m eating my heart out.”
Yet there was reason to believe that his nephew was still alive. In the wake of Dr. Bitton’s TV interview, Israeli intelligence learned that Mr. Sinwar was asking about Mr. Adar’s well-being, and that subordinates had assured him that he was all right.
It turned out the subordinates had asked after the wrong person. On Jan. 5, the government told the family what new intelligence showed: Wounded while defending his kibbutz, Mr. Adar had apparently died not long after being dragged into Gaza, one of at least 35 hostages believed to be dead, among roughly 125 still being held.
Dr. Bitton returned to Nir Oz on a sunny winter morning. Blackened buildings peeked out between columnar cactuses, deafening booms from artillery shells interrupted chirping parrots and cooing doves, and an acrid smell still hung in the air. “The smell of death,” Dr. Bitton said, wrinkling his nose.
Rounding a corner, he stopped. “That’s his blood,” he said, his face tightening in grief as he pointed toward a concrete wall that once hid the kibbutz’s dumpsters, now a dark-stained marker of his nephew’s last stand. And nearby, a small memorial, a fleet of toy tractors.
“Do you see what’s lost?” Dr. Bitton said. “It’s like that here. No one remains, just birds and stories.”
These days, Dr. Bitton meets regularly with the hostages’ families, sharing everything he learned about Mr. Sinwar, to help them manage expectations. In recent weeks, international negotiators have pressed Israel and Hamas to accept a deal that, in its first phase, would see some of the hostages exchanged for many more Palestinian prisoners and a temporary cease-fire, according to officials familiar with the process. But Hamas has held out for a total cessation of hostilities that would leave it in charge of Gaza, a red line for the Israeli government.
“I tell the families not to get their hopes up,” Dr. Bitton said. “In this situation there is no chance.”
Dr. Bitton and his sister have revisited, over and again, that long-ago day in the prison infirmary. Ms. Adar said they try to laugh at the “absurdity” of it all. “On the one hand my brother saved a life, and on the other his sister lost her boy to the same person he saved.”
She assures him there was nothing else he could have done.
“These are our values. Yuval never would have acted differently, never, and neither would I,” she said. “But in the end we were screwed.”
First and foremost by their own government, they said. Hamas is Hamas, as Dr. Bitton put it. “With Sinwar, I know he wants to destroy us,” Ms. Adar echoed. “My greatest anger is that there was no one to defend our borders.”
Not everyone in Israel seems to see it that way. Sitting together in a cafe in Eilat, a town on the Red Sea where the survivors of Nir Oz were first relocated, brother and sister were approached by a stranger. The woman fixed her gaze on Dr. Bitton, apparently recognizing him from his interview on TV. She had a question.
“Why did you save him?” she asked. “Why?”
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon. Julie Tate contributed research.
Jo Becker is a reporter in the investigative unit and a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner. She is the author of “Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality.” More about Jo Becker
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Yahya Sinwar | Hamas Leader, Biography, & Facts | Britannica
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Yahya Sinwar Hamas leader
- In full: Yaḥyā Ibrāhīm Ḥasan al-Sinwār
- Born: October 29, 1962, Khan Younis refugee camp, Gaza Strip (age 61 as at 2024)
Yahya Sinwar (born October 29, 1962, Khan Younis refugee camp, Gaza Strip) is the leader (2017– ) of Hamas in the Gaza Strip and an early architect of Hamas’s armed wing. Sinwar is considered one of the masterminds behind the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, the deadliest day for Israel since its independence (see Israel-Hamas War of 2023).
Early life, early activity in Hamas, and imprisonment
Sinwar was born in the Khan Younis refugee camp to parents who had been displaced from Ashkelon in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The camp was densely packed with impoverished families, who lived in poor conditions and relied on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for basic services. In the early 1980s he enrolled at the Islamic University of Gaza, where his study of the Arabic language helped shape his charismatic self-presentation. He entered the university at a time when many young Palestinians in the Gaza Strip were looking toward Islamism to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after decades of pan-Arabism had failed to do so, and student organizations that combined Islamic thought with Palestinian nationalism were quickly growing. In 1982 Sinwar was detained for his participation in such organizations, although there were no formal charges.
In 1985, prior to the formation of Hamas, Sinwar helped organize al-Majd (Arabic: “Glory”; an acronym for Munaẓẓamat al-Jihād wa al-Daʿwah, “Organization for Jihad and Daʿwah [promotion of Islamic ideals]”). Al-Majd was a network of Islamist youths who tasked themselves with exposing the growing number of Palestinian informants who had been recruited by Israel in recent years. When Hamas was formed in 1987, al-Majd was folded into its security cadre. In 1988 the network was found to possess weapons, and Sinwar was detained by Israel for several weeks. The following year, he was convicted for the murder of Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel and was sentenced to four life sentences in prison.
During Sinwar’s long incarceration, he maintained powerful sway over his fellow prisoners, using tactics of abuse and manipulation and help from his connections outside prison. He made a point to punish fellow prisoners he suspected of being informants and once compelled some 1,600 prisoners to undertake a hunger strike. He also spent much of his spare time studying what he could about his Israeli enemies, reading Israeli newspapers and becoming fluent in Hebrew in the process.
Some of the most transformative events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict took place during Sinwar’s decades in prison. In the early 1990s the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel concluded the Oslo Accords, which set out a peace process for the creation of a Palestinian state in exchange for the PLO’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist. The process was derailed by suicide bombings by Hamas and the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist, but hope of getting the process back on track remained for several years. That glimmer of hope dimmed during the second Palestinian intifada (uprising; 2000–05), and in elections held in 2006 Palestinians registered their disappointment with the PLO by giving a plurality of the vote to Hamas. As a result of that outcome, the relationship between Israel and the interim Palestinian Authority (PA), which had been set up by the Oslo Accords, deteriorated even further. In 2007, when factional fighting within the PA left Hamas in sole charge of the Gaza Strip, Israel and Egypt blockaded the territory, setting the stage for several armed conflicts between Hamas and Israel in the years ahead. By the time Sinwar was released in 2011, the door for peace had both opened and closed, and he had witnessed none of the optimism of the Oslo era firsthand.
Sinwar’s release in Shalit prisoner exchange and his rise in the ranks of Hamas
Benjamin Netanyahu, Gilad Shalit, and Ehud Barak
Sinwar’s release came as part of the high-profile prisoner swap for Gilad Shalit. Shalit, a soldier of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), had been abducted by Hamas in 2006 while he was stationed at a border crossing. After several failed attempts to broker Shalit’s freedom, Egypt and Germany secured a deal for his release in October 2011. Sinwar’s brother, Mohammed, who had been assigned to guard Shalit, insisted that Sinwar be included in the exchange. On the same day that Shalit was released to Israel, Sinwar was among the first set of Palestinian prisoners who were returned to the Gaza Strip. When he arrived, he was already sporting the emblematic green headband of Hamas’s armed wing.
Leadership of Hamas and the October 7, 2023, attacks
Sinwar’s fiery rhetoric spoke to the hard-line militants, and his history of a heavy hand earned their trust that he would carry out his threats. In one of his first public appearances, Sinwar told a group of young Gazans: “Gone is the time in which Hamas discussed recognition of Israel. The discussion now is about when we will wipe out Israel.” Observers braced for the group to take on a more militant direction. But, in his first several years as leader, he laid low, and his pragmatic approach toward dealmaking began to reverse Hamas’s isolation. Months after Sinwar took the reins, Hamas forged a reconciliation deal with the PA, and, for the first time since 2007, it relinquished control of much of the Gaza Strip to the PA for a brief period. Relations with Egypt also improved, and the neighboring country eased its restrictions on its border crossing with the Gaza Strip. The group also reached out to Iran for rapprochement, and Iran restored Hamas to its network of allies and resumed offering it full support. In late 2018, negotiations with Israel for a long-term truce were underway and continued until the announcement in January 2020 of U.S. Pres. Donald Trump’s peace plan, which was embraced by Israel as a path forward but dismissed by the Palestinians as a nonstarter. The contradictions of Sinwar’s leadership, as both firebrand and pragmatist, were reflected in a new document of general principles issued by the group after he took charge: it at once acknowledged that a Palestinian state within the borders of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is “a formula of national consensus”—read by many at the time as consenting to a two-state solution—while simultaneously refusing “recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity” in any part of historic Palestine.
May 2021 marked a return to his more regular hostility. Weeks of escalating tensions in Jerusalem boiled over, and clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli police, particularly at the compound surrounding Al-Aqsa Mosque, left hundreds injured. Hamas responded by sending rockets into Jerusalem and southern and central Israel, prompting 11 days of intense fighting between Hamas and Israel. Sinwar’s popularity surged after the conflict, and his virulence returned in full force. At a rally in 2022 celebrating the anniversary of Hamas’s founding, he called upon each person to “be ready to rise up as a gale to defend Al-Aqsa” if Israel would not conclude a deal to release Palestinian prisoners. In rhyming Arabic he continued to muster the crowd: “We will come to you in a roaring flood, in rockets without end, and in a flood of soldiers limitless [in number]. We will come to you with millions of our people (ummah), one tide after another.”
Aftermath of the October 7, 2023, attack
On October 7, 2023, Hamas, in an assault that it dubbed “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” led the most devastating attack on Israel since its independence. It began with a barrage of at least 2,200 rockets in just 20 minutes, providing cover for at least 1,500 militants who infiltrated Israel at dozens of points along the heavily fortified border by using explosives, bulldozers, and paragliders. They not only attacked military outposts but also killed families inside their homes and attendees of an outdoor music festival. Within hours, about 1,200 people were dead and some 240 others were taken hostage. Adding to the trauma of the event was the fact that it was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. The assault showed hallmarks of Sinwar’s tactics, and the taking of hostages echoed his preoccupation with prisoner exchanges.
Israel’s response to the attack was devastating for Gazans. Israel declared war for the first time in 50 years and implemented a full siege that cut off water, electricity, food, and fuel from entering the Gaza Strip. Within weeks, air strikes had led to more Palestinian deaths than any previous conflict for the Palestinians since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, while more than 1.4 million had become internally displaced. When in November Israel released about 240 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for 110 of the hostages taken by Hamas, the number of released prisoners paled in comparison to the thousands detained since October 7. Sinwar, presumed to be hiding in the web of Gaza’s subterranean tunnels, is the top target for Israel in its invasion and is considered, according to an IDF spokesman, “a dead man walking.”
The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica.
EU adds Hamas chief in Gaza Yahya Sinwar to terror blacklist
Bloc says decision to proscribe mastermind of October 7 massacres is 'response to the threat posed by Hamas and its brutal and indiscriminate terrorist attacks in Israel'
The European Union said Tuesday that it has put the mastermind of the devastating October 7 attack on Israel, Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar, on its terrorist list.
EU headquarters said the move was in “response to the threat posed by Hamas and its brutal and indiscriminate terrorist attacks in Israel.”
It said Sinwar “is subject to the freezing of his funds and other financial assets in EU member states. It is also prohibited for EU operators to make funds and economic resources available to him.” No further details were provided.
Sinwar, 61, has not been seen since October 7, when Palestinian terrorists stormed the Gaza border and killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took around 240 hostages. Israel, which has declared him a “dead man walking,” believes Sinwar is hiding in a tunnel somewhere in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.
Foreign Minister Israel Katz hailed the EU decision to proscribe Sinwar as “just and moral.”
“I thank all our friends that supported this decision,” Katz wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “This decision is also a result of our diplomatic efforts to strangle the resources of the Hamas, to delegitimize them and prohibit all support to them.”
“We will continue to eradicate the root of evil, in Gaza and wherever it raises its head,” he added.
In November, the EU froze the funds and other assets in Europe of Muhammad Deif, the commander general of Hamas’s military wing, and of deputy commander Marwan Issa.
Hamas and its military wing have been on the EU’s terrorist list as organizations for about 20 years.
Hamas leader Sinwar plotted Israel's most deadly day in plain sight | Reuters
Hamas leader Sinwar plotted Israel's most deadly day in plain sight
"DEAD MAN WALKING"
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Reporting by Stephen Farrell and Jonathan Saul in London, Samia Nakhoul in Beirut and Nidal Al-Mughrabi in Cairo; Writing by Stephen Farrell; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel
Sinwar, who has striking snow-white hair and jet-black eyebrows, is the leader of Hamas's political wing in Gaza, and one of Israel's most wanted men.
It holds him responsible along with others for the 7 October raid into southern Israel, in which about 1,200 people were killed, and more than 200 others kidnapped.
"Yahya Sinwar is the commander… and he is a dead man," declared the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari in early October.
"This abominable attack was decided upon by Yahya Sinwar," said IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi. "Therefore he and all those under him are dead men walking."
That includes Mohammed Deif, the elusive leader of Hamas's military wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades.
Hugh Lovatt, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), believes Deif was the brains behind the planning of the 7 October attack because it was a military operation, but Sinwar "would likely have been part of the group that planned and influenced it".
Israel believes that Sinwar, who is effectively second-in-command after Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, is cornered below ground, hiding in tunnels somewhere beneath Gaza with his bodyguards, communicating with no-one for fear that his signal will be tracked and located.
Upbringing and arrests
Sinwar, 61, widely known as Abu Ibrahim, was born in the Khan Younis refugee camp at the southern end of the Gaza Strip. His parents were from Ashkelon but became refugees after what Palestinians call "al-Naqba" (the Catastrophe) - the mass displacement of Palestinians from their ancestral homes in Palestine in the war that followed Israel's founding in 1948.
He was educated at Khan Younis Secondary School for Boys and then graduated with a bachelor's degree in Arabic language from the Islamic University of Gaza.
At that time, Khan Younis was a "bastion" of support for the Muslim Brotherhood, says Ehud Yaari, a fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who interviewed Sinwar in prison four times.
The Islamist group "was a massive movement for young people going to the mosques in the poverty of the refugee camp", Yaari says, and it would later take on a similar importance for Hamas.
Sinwar was first arrested by Israel in 1982, aged 19, for "Islamic activities" and then arrested again in 1985. It was around this time that he won the confidence of Hamas's founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
The two became "very, very close", says Kobi Michael, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. This relationship with the organisation's spiritual leader would later give Sinwar a "halo effect" within the movement, Michael adds.
Two years after Hamas was founded in 1987, he set up the group's feared internal security organisation, the al-Majd. He was still only 25.
Al-Majd became infamous for punishing those accused of so-called morality offences - Michael says he targeted shops that stocked "sex videos" - as well as hunting down and killing anyone suspected of collaborating with Israel.
Yaari says he was responsible for numerous "brutal killings" of people suspected of co-operation with Israel. "Some of them with his own hands and he was proud of that, talking about it to me and to others."
According to Israeli officials, he later confessed to punishing a suspected informer by getting the man's brother to bury him alive, finishing the job using a spoon instead of a spade.
Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, attends a demonstration held to mark Al-Quds (Jerusalem) Day, a commemorative day in support of the Palestinian people celebrated annually on the last Friday of the Muslim month of Ramadan, in Gaza City on April 14.
Yahya Sinwar the shadowy Hamas leader behind the war against Israel
Daniel Estrin
International Correspondent, Jerusalem
Daniel Estrin is NPR's international correspondent in Jerusalem.
Since joining NPR in 2017, he has reported from Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates. He has chronicled the Trump administration's policies that have shaped the region, and told stories of everyday life for Israelis and Palestinians. He has also uncovered tales of ancient manuscripts, secret agents and forbidden travel.
He and his team were awarded an Edward R. Murrow award for a 2019 report challenging the U.S. military's account about its raid against ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
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Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas militant group's leader in the Gaza Strip, speaks to international press, including NPR, in Gaza City on Nov. 21, 2018
Newly released Palestinian prisoners are surrounded by supporters in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank early Thursday.
TEL AVIV, Israel — The deadly Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, dragging Israeli hostages back to Gaza, and high-stakes negotiations for their release could not have happened without the approval of one secretive man.
Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, is widely believed to have helped mastermind the unprecedented Hamas attack that changed the course of Israeli-Palestinian history.
He spent more than two decades behind bars in Israel, before being freed 12 years ago in a hostage ransom deal his brother helped negotiate. In early October, Sinwar outsmarted Israel with the same hostage-taking tactic — resulting in Israel's deadliest day on record.
Now Israel seeks to eradicate the Islamist militant group Sinwar leads in Gaza. Israel, the United States, Europe and others designate Hamas as a terrorist organization, but its surprise attack earned it widespread support among Palestinians, many of whom regard it as resisting decades of Israeli subjugation.
Israel also vows to kill Sinwar, a short, wiry man with cropped white hair. Israeli leaders have deemed him a psychopath.
Israelis and Palestinians presume Sinwar is hiding underground somewhere in Gaza, negotiating with world powers over hostage releases, trying to outmaneuver Israel, and surviving another day.
Ratting out suspected spies
Born on Oct. 29, 1962, according to Hamas, Sinwar helped found the group's internal security apparatus in the late 1980s. He earned a nickname among Palestinians: the butcher of Khan Younis, where he grew up in southern Gaza. His role in Hamas for years was to help root out suspected Palestinian informants for Israel.
He was imprisoned in Israel on four life sentences, accused of playing a role in killing Israeli soldiers and Palestinian collaborators with Israel.
"He [has] so many secrets," says his former prison mate, Esmat Mansour, who now serves as a commentator of current affairs in Arabic-language media.
Mansour recalls, Sinwar assembled a small team of confidants who would smuggle cellphones into prison, interrogate new prisoners about how they had been caught preparing an attack against Israel, and catch Palestinian inmates serving as informants for Israel.
"So many spies," Mansour says, speaking to NPR in the Palestinian city of Ramallah.
In 2006, Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was captured by Hamas and held hostage in Gaza for five years. The man who guarded the captive soldier was none other than Sinwar's own brother, Mohammed.
In 2011, Hamas freed the captive soldier in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Sinwar's brother made sure Sinwar was among them.
"All the prisoners [looked] at him as a man who can decide about their life," Mansour says.
His VIP status in prison, and return to Gaza with the released prisoners, helped Sinwar rise in the ranks to lead Hamas in Gaza.
Rare appearances with the press
Over the years, security-conscious Sinwar rarely appeared in public.
But he did meet with the foreign press twice around periods of conflict with Israel.
"Your presence for us is a big accomplishment and asset for our people and our cause," he told the visiting journalists at a 2018 press conference in Gaza City that lasted two hours.
At the time, Hamas was holding two Israeli citizens and the bodies of two killed Israeli soldiers. NPR asked Sinwar about the captives. Sinwar said it was a confidential file he wasn't prepared to talk about. Hamas is still holding them today.
At the time, Hamas was encouraging violent protests along the Israeli border fence of the blockaded Gaza Strip. He said it was a strategy he learned from his hunger strikes in Israeli prison — he said Palestinians in Gaza were protesting their Israeli jailers for better conditions.
Quiet for quiet
The strategy seemed to work.
Hamas and Israel, which do not speak directly to each other, reached an indirect arrangement known as "quiet for quiet." Hamas agreed to cool hostilities and Israel agreed to ease Gaza's high unemployment rate, granting coveted Israeli work permits to thousands of laborers from the territory.
A 2021 Hamas-Israel war interrupted that deal. Sinwar gave another press conference to foreign media after the war, denying that Hamas had routed international humanitarian aid to its clandestine effort to build underground tunnels for Hamas fighters.
Israel's permits for workers from Gaza resumed, and surged to higher numbers, while fighting between Gaza and Israel ceased. The number of work permits Israel granted Gaza laborers, before the current war, surpassed 8,000.
Eyal Hulata, who served as Israel's national security adviser last year, thought this strategy bought Israel some quiet on the Gaza border.
"I don't know. I thought we had an understanding what Sinwar's thinking was, and this was so wrong," Hulata told NPR in a recent briefing with journalists.
Israel was shocked on Oct. 7, when Hamas fighters stormed the border, killed about 1,200 people and took back to Gaza more than 250 captives.
Sinwar's strategy now
David Meidan, the Israeli negotiator who, along with other officials, approved Sinwar's release from prison in the 2011 exchange of prisoners for one Israeli captive soldier, says Sinwar's strategy with the Oct. 7 attack was similar.
"First of all, to capture maximum hostages, and to use them as a tool to release his friends," Meidan says.
Sinwar has not yet secured the release of his fellow prison mates with whom he spent years behind bars in Israel. But last week, Israel freed Palestinian women and minors jailed in recent weeks and years, in exchange for Hamas releasing some of its Israeli hostages.
During that time, both sides agreed to a temporary cease-fire in the war. For every 10 hostages Hamas released per day, Israel extended the cease-fire another day and released 30 Palestinian prisoners and detainees. Meidan said it helped Sinwar buy time.
"He needs time now," Meidan says. "The time will help him to survive."
Sinwar wants a mega deal
Many Israelis worried that the pause in fighting would help Hamas fighters regroup, and leave more time for international pressure to mount against Israel resuming its military assault. But Israel renewed combat in Gaza on Friday, following a dispute over the kind of hostages Hamas offered to release and renewed Gaza rocket fire onto Israel.
Sinwar will likely keep holding onto Israeli captive soldiers as a bargaining chip for his bigger goal: to secure the release of all Palestinian prisoners. Israel currently jails 7,677 Palestinian "security" inmates, according to the Israeli legal aid group HaMoked.
"We are ready to conduct an immediate prisoner exchange deal that includes the release of all Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails in exchange for all prisoners held by the Palestinian resistance," Sinwar said in an Oct. 28 statement.
Opinion polls in October showed large Israeli support for such a comprehensive prisoner swap.
When they end the war, they will make negotiations to release all the prisoners, and then it will be the biggest picture of victory in Palestinian history," says Mansour, Sinwar's former prison mate.
Dead man walking?
After the last Israel-Hamas war in 2021, Sinwar dared Israel to assassinate him, and walked openly in the streets of Gaza.
Today, as the 2023 war is not yet complete, Sinwar is on Israel's hit list.
"We will get to Yahya Sinwar, and we will assassinate him," said Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant last month, "I say here, to the residents of Gaza, if you get (to him) before us, it will shorten the war."
A Palestinian man carries a child wounded during an Israeli bombardment in Rafah, on the southern Gaza Strip, on Saturday.
Israel says it has hit more than 400 targets in Gaza since end of truce with Hamas
TEL AVIV, Israel — The Israeli military says it attacked more than 400 targets throughout Gaza in the 24 hours since the end of a week-long cease-fire with Hamas sparked a resumption of combat operations.
The Israel Defense Forces released video and photos of Israeli soldiers conducting ground operations and aerial footage showing airstrikes on buildings and infrastructure. One video, that appeared to target a human figure walking in a street, was described by the IDF as "a strike on terrorists" in western Jabalia, an area in Gaza's north.
In a statement, the IDF said that air force fighter jets had struck more than 50 targets around Khan Younis, a city in the southern part of the Gaza Strip.
The heavy bombardment and ground operations across Gaza killed nearly 200 Palestinians and wounded hundreds more in the first day of resumed fighting, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-controlled Gaza
The temporary truce that collapsed early Friday followed seven weeks of fighting in Gaza sparked by simultaneous attacks on southern Israel by Hamas militants on Oct. 7. The attacks killed 1,200 people, Israel says. The militants also seized around 240 captives, more than 100 of whom were subsequently freed in a series of hostages-for-prisoners swaps during the cease-fire. Israel released nearly 250 Palestinian prisoners and detainees as part of the deal.
VP Harris says Israel "must do more to protect innocent civilians"
Vice President Harris told reporters on Saturday that Israel must do more to protect civilians in Gaza. Speaking in Dubai, the site of the COP28 climate summit, She said Israel had a right to "eliminate the threat of Hamas" after the Oct. 7 attack, but she emphasized that "it matters how."
"Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering and the images and videos coming from Gaza are devastating," she said.
"We believe Israel must do more to protect innocent civilians," Harris said.
Israel pulls back from cease-fire talks in Qatar
The pause in fighting and exchange of captives — an agreement originally slated to last four days — was extended another three days to facilitate more hostages-for-prisoners swaps.
Earlier this week, CIA Director William Burns and David Barnea, the chief of Israel's spy agency, Mossad, held talks with Egypt Intelligence Minister Gen. Abbas Kamel and Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani in Qatar on the possibility of further extending the cease-fire.
There was some hope that the deal could be revived even after the resumption of hostilities in Gaza.
However, on Saturday, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement saying that Barnea had "ordered his team in Doha to return to Israel." It added that Hamas "did not fulfill its part of the agreement, which included the release of all children and women according to a list that was forwarded to Hamas and approved by it."
"The head of the Mossad thanks the head of the CIA, the Egyptian Minister of Intelligence and the Prime Minister of Qatar for their partnership in the tremendous mediation efforts that led to the release of 84 children and women from the Gaza Strip in addition to 24 foreign citizens," the statement said.
Harris declined to comment on details of talks to free more hostages.
Israel has notified at least five Israeli families that their loved ones taken hostage by Hamas are no longer alive. More than 100 others remain in captivity, according to Israel's military.
Fewer aid trucks enter Gaza after truce collapses
A United Nations official tells NPR that about 50 aid trucks managed to enter Gaza via a border crossing with Egypt and were waiting to be unloaded Saturday morning. However, the vehicles did not reach Gaza's hardest-hit north. The number of trucks delivering aid on Friday was also far fewer than the around 200 per day during the week-long pause in fighting — a number that relief officials have said is far too small to meet the needs of Gaza's 2.2 million people.
Even so, a senior official of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said the cease-fire "offered a glimpse of what can happen when the guns fall silent."
"We need to maintain – and build on – the progress in aid delivery," Martin Griffiths, OCHA's under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, said. "We need civilians and the life-sustaining infrastructure they rely on to be protected. We need the remaining hostages to be released immediately and unconditionally. We need a humanitarian ceasefire. We need the fighting to stop."
Israel won't renew top U.N. aid official's visa
Amid what international groups have described as a growing humanitarian crisis in besieged Gaza, Israel says it will not renew the visa of the top U.N. aid official for the Palestinian territories.
Nearly three years ago, Canadian-born Lynn Hastings was named deputy special envoy for the Middle East peace process and the resident coordinator for the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
But a spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said on Friday that the U.N. had been informed by Israeli authorities "that they would not renew the visa of Miss Hastings past its due date at some point later this month," according to Israeli media.
In a statement to NPR, Israel's foreign ministry confirmed that Hastings' visa would not be renewed. Citing what it calls the U.N.'s "one-sided and biased attitude" in the conflict in Gaza, the foreign ministry said it had decided "not to automatically approve the granting of visas to U.N. representatives in Israel and to examine each case individually."
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/02/1216705856/hamas-israel-palestinians-gaza-war-ceasefire
In Gaza, a hidden threat could kill Palestinians even after a cease-fire
A Palestinian boy sits near the rubble of a residential building destroyed in an Israeli strike in Al-Zawayda in the central Gaza Strip on Saturday.
U.S. medical volunteers in Rafah hospital say they've never seen a worse health crisis
Editor's note: This story contains graphic descriptions of injuries.
AMMAN, Jordan — At one of the last functioning hospitals in Rafah, scenes of horror are conveyed in clinical descriptions as U.S. medical volunteers grapple with the effects of Israeli military operations and border closures after seven months of war in Gaza.
"They tried to suture up the hole in the heart — they couldn't," Dr. Usman Shah, from California, explains to Dr. Ammar Ghanem about a patient wounded in an explosion. Ghanem, a vice president of the Syrian American Medical Society, is overseeing the intensive care unit and made a video on Friday of his conversation with Shah.
"There was too much blood loss – the heart cavity, they tried to massage it but the heart cavity was empty," Shah says.
The two are members of a team of U.S. and U.S.-trained doctors who arrived in Rafah 10 days ago as part of a medical mission organized by the Palestinian American Medical Association. Now, nearing the end of the mission, with Israel closing the main border crossing, they are unable to leave.
In the video recorded Friday by Ghanem, Shah tells him about the other two patients who arrived that morning with non-survivable injuries.
Shah, dressed in blue scrubs, relates in an even voice how the jaw of one of the patients crumbled under his hand when he touched him. In the only visible sign of distress, he massages his temple and briefly closes his eyes as he tells the story.
Ghanem says conditions have worsened considerably since the border closure on May 7, with many of the local physicians and nurses unable to come to work because they have had to evacuate their families.
'Prioritizing patient lives'
Most of the doctors and nurses on the mission are experienced conflict zone volunteers. But Ghanem says they have never seen anything like this.
"Unfortunately here I have to prioritize patient lives. When I say 'prioritizing patient lives' I mean I know that term but I never used it before until I came here," he said in an interview with NPR by video call from Rafah.
The benign-sounding term refers to deciding whom to stop treating and let die in order to divert resources to those with a better chance of surviving.
In one of two videos sent to NPR from the hospital Ghanem points out to a colleague one of his most difficult cases – an 18-year-old woman with a skull fracture so severe that brain material was visible. He said they did not have drugs strong enough to keep her sedated.
He said they stopped treatment for a woman suffering from acute pancreatitis after two days because she required continued oxygen that might support several other patients.
"So you see how sad this is?" he said in the interview. "I mean this patient is only like about 60 years old. We will not do this in the U.S. as you know, but this time of war and lack of resources that we are forced to do this."
Ghanem, who did not want the hospital identified for security reasons, estimated that two to three patients a day die in the intensive care unit because of lack of supplies or equipment.
A lack of essential supplies
Part of the problem is that items critical for hospitals are banned by Israel which says they can be used by Hamas for military purposes. The list of items it considers dual-use include some water disinfection materials.
The list does not cover all items that are reportedly banned. Save the Children has said it has had shipments rejected by Israel because they contained sleeping bags with zippers. An Israeli legal center, Geisha, has compiled a list of items that have been reported by organizations to have been rejected, including fishing rods and plastic sheets for tents.
The result, according to the U.N. and international aid agencies, is long delays and a spiraling crisis in humanitarian aid.
After the killing of seven workers in Gaza from the U.S.-based World Central Kitchen last month, Israel, under U.S. pressure, pledged to allow in more aid, improve coordination and to safeguard humanitarian staff.
A statement issued this week by seven major international aid organizations, including Save the Children and Care, said those pledges have not been fulfilled.
"Humanitarian actors see no significant improvement from Israeli authorities in addressing the dire challenges to prevent life-saving aid for Gaza's 2.3 million residents," the statement read.
Israel denies that it holds up aid.
International aid and medical workers who were either in Rafah or who had recently left, warned at a press briefing this week that the damage to Gaza infrastructure, lack of clean water, ongoing attacks and increasing starvation had brought humanitarian operations to the brink of collapse.
Israel has issued evacuation orders to sectors of Rafah, where more than 1.3 million people are crammed in near the Egyptian border. But for many there is no where to go.
Ghada al-Haddad, a Gaza-based communications officer for Oxfam, said families were pitching makeshift tents on sidewalks and in graveyards. She said others had moved to the beach, where there is no clean water and no sanitation.
Oxford professor Dr. Nick Maynard, a surgeon from England who traveled to Gaza three times on medical missions since the start of the war, said most of his time over Christmas was spent operating on major explosive injuries to the chest and abdomen. He said on his last trip this month that complications due to malnutrition in trauma cases had increased.
"I operated on many patients in the last two weeks who had awful complications from their abdominal surgery related to inadequate nutrition and particularly those with the abdominal wall breaking down," he said. "Literally their intestines end up hanging outside."
He said the hospitals lacked even colostomy bags along with materials to manage wounds and provide nutritional support.
Maynard said two of his patients, girls age 16 and 18, had survivable injuries but died last week as a direct result of malnutrition contributing to their deaths.
"We will see more of that in the coming months," he predicted
"We're at a tipping point right now," said Dr. John Kahler, co-founder of MedGlobal, a U.S.-based medical aid organization. He said Palestinian children before the war were getting only about 80% of the calories they needed. Now, seven months into the war, the effects of consistent deprivation are showing.
"It's at that time that the immunological system begins to break down," he said. "It's at that time where infections and complications of malnutrition will start."
Desperate for fuel
Aid officials said particularly alarming is the lack of fuel being allowed in. Most of Gaza's infrastructure has been destroyed and Israel has so far allowed fuel trucks to enter only through the main Rafah border crossing. That. crossing has now been closed since the beginning of the week.
"The whole aid operation runs on fuel," said Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International. "That means water can't be pumped, lights can't be kept on in hospitals, vehicles cannot distribute aid. So if the fuel is cut off the aid operation collapses, and it collapses quickly."
The Israeli military on Friday in an apparent response to the concerns said it had transferred more than 52,000 gallons of fuel to be made available to international organizations in Gaza through Kerem Shalom crossing into southern Gaza.
The head of the U.N.'s relief operations, Andrea De Domenico, told the French press agency AFP that amount of fuel was needed each day to maintain operations.
White House national security spokesman John Kirby on Friday said the U.S. wants the Rafah crossing, the only one able to handle large numbers of fuel trucks, opened immediately.
"Every day that that crossing is not available and usable for humanitarian assistance, there's going to be more suffering, and that's of deep concern to us," he told reporters. "And so once again, we urge the Israelis to open up that crossing to humanitarian assistance immediately, that aid is desperately needed."
At the Rafah hospital on Thursday, Monica Johnston, a burn nurse from Portland, Ore., was back at the ICU, only partially recovered from a gastrointestinal infection that left her dehydrated, dizzy and nauseous.
One of her patients was a 7-year-old boy with burns over 80% of his body.
"We're running out of pain medicine, running out of blood pressure medicine. So we cannot keep these people alive or comfortable. It's absolutely horrifying what we're seeing here," she said.
Johnston said everyone was desperately hoping for a cease-fire. (Israel says it is rejecting a sustained ceasefire because it needs to eliminate Hamas's military capability.)
"[A ceasefire]s will enable us to finish our mission, enable new help to come in, new supplies to come in, and eventually enable our safe return home," she said.
Israel resumes airstrikes after it says Hamas violated truce
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/01/1216333362/israel-hamas-ceasefire-combat-gaza-hostages
Workers rush injured people to Mohammed Yousef al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah as Israel resumed its bombing Friday morning in the Gaza Strip.
At Mohammed Yousef al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah, Palestinians mourned children and relatives from four different families killed in Rafah as Israel resumed its bombing campaign Friday morning in the Gaza Strip.
Palestinians inspect the destruction following an Israeli airstrike on the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip on Friday.
This picture taken from southern Israel near the border with the Gaza Strip shows a rocket being fired from inside the Gaza Strip towards Israel, as battles resumed between the Israeli forces and Hamas militants, on Friday.
TEL AVIV, Israel — Israel's warplanes began pounding targets in Gaza early Friday, shortly after the collapse of a cease-fire deal that had allowed the release of more than 100 hostages seized by Hamas militants and nearly 250 Palestinians from Israeli jails.
By mid-afternoon, Israel had already launched more than 200 airstrikes across the territory, the Israeli military said, including in Rafah and Khan Younis, the south's two largest cities where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the north have sought shelter.
Health officials in Gaza reported 178 deaths and nearly 600 injuries in the renewed bombardment Friday.
Airstrikes in Rafah, near the Egyptian border, began just after 7 a.m. local time. One struck an apartment building near an open market.
Five-year-old Joury Miqdad, who woke up in the morning and went to play with her cousin, was killed in the Rafah strike, the girl's father, Ramadan Miqdad, told NPR. Her cousin was injured. Joury's mother, Fadwa Miqdad, cried aloud for her daughter.
"My beloved, it was going to be your birthday, I was going to make a cake for you," she said.
As Hamas and Israel trade blame, talks continue on new deal
The end of the truce and the resumption of fighting came hours after a seventh hostages-for-prisoners exchange between the two sides, and just as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was leaving Israel after high-level meetings, including with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Blinken had pressed Israel to further extend the temporary truce.
Israel's military said it was restarting combat operations because Hamas "violated the operational pause ... and fired toward Israeli territory." Netanyahu's office added that Hamas "did not live up to its duty to release all the kidnapped women today, and launched rockets at the citizens of Israel."
"With the return to fighting we will emphasize: the Israeli government is committed to achieving the goals of the war — to release our hostages, eliminate Hamas and ensure that Gaza will never again pose a threat to the residents of Israel," the prime minister's office said.
Hamas in a statement issued Friday afternoon local time said Israel "bears full responsibility" for the breakdown of the cease-fire. In all-night negotiations, the Islamist militant group said it "offered to exchange prisoners and the elderly (and) ... offered to hand over the bodies of those killed and detained as a result of the Israeli bombing."
Hamas referred by name to one family of captives. Earlier, Hamas had said Shiri Bibas and her two children, Ariel and Kfir, were killed in an Israeli airstrike. Israel has said it is assessing whether or not they are dead. Videos from Oct. 7 showed the family, including father Yarden, was alive when they were taken into Gaza.
In its statement, Hamas said it had "also offered to hand over the bodies of the Bibas family and release their father, so that he could [participate] in their burial ceremonies," in addition to handing over two other Israeli captives. It said Israel had "refused to deal with all these offers."
Hamas also said the Biden administration bears "full responsibility for the continuation of Zionist war crimes in the Gaza Strip, after its absolute support for it," and after what it said was Blinken's "green light" for Israel to resume the war.
Blinken, speaking on a stop in Dubai, said in his discussions in Israel, he'd focused on trying to secure the release of hostages, increasing humanitarian aid to Gaza, and discussing how Israel can make sure Hamas "never again has the ability to do what it did on October 7th."
Blinken said the pause came to an end because "Hamas reneged on commitments it made." Referring to an attack at a bus stop outside Jerusalem on Thursday, Blinken called it "an atrocious terrorist attack" that killed three people, and wounded others, including Americans. He also said Hamas "began firing rockets before the pause had ended" and "reneged on commitments it made in terms of releasing certain hostages."
Earlier on Friday, a spokesman for the foreign ministry in Qatar, where the temporary cease-fire was negotiated, said the Gulf state was "deeply saddened" by the collapse of the deal, but confirmed that talks were ongoing "with the aim of a return to a pause."
Qatar said Israel's renewed strikes on Gaza "complicates mediation efforts and exacerbates the humanitarian catastrophe in the Strip."
The temporary cease-fire, which began a week ago, came after weeks of heavy bombardment by Israeli air and ground forces in response to an Oct. 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel that killed 1,200 people, Israel says. Some 240 hostages, including Israelis and a number of foreign workers, were also seized from communities bordering Gaza.
Israel renews calls for civilians in Gaza to move south
After hostilities resumed, Israel's military issued a warning to Palestinians in Gaza that "Hamas uses the residents of the Gaza Strip as human shields, placing its command and military infrastructure in residential areas, hospitals, mosques, and schools."
"Hamas turns civilian sites into military targets while using civilians and civilian facilities as a human shield," the military said, issuing what it said was an interactive evacuation map for residents that it says shows safe evacuation areas. However, many Gaza residents have been without electricity or an internet connection for weeks and the map is difficult to navigate on a cell phone.
Israeli planes dropped leaflets over Khan Younis, warning that the city is a dangerous combat zone. It said residents should move to Rafah, about 6 miles to the south.
During the week-long pause in fighting, Hamas and other militants in Gaza released more than 100 hostages, most of them Israelis, in return for 240 Palestinians freed from prisons in Israel.
The truce also allowed desperately needed humanitarian aid to reach besieged Gaza, whose 2.2 million people had been under weeks of bombardment from Israeli airstrikes and a ground campaign that has killed at least 13,300 people, according to Gaza's health ministry.
Expressing "deep regret" that military operations had restarted in Gaza, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in a post on X that he still hopes "that it will be possible to renew the pause that was established. The return to hostilities only shows how important it is to have a true humanitarian ceasefire."
The original four-day cease-fire deal that began a week ago was twice extended for a total of three days to allow for the exchange of more captives. Israel had agreed to prolong the truce if Hamas turned over an additional 10 hostages per day in exchange for 30 Palestinians. But on Thursday, in the final exchange under the extension, Hamas released only eight captives.
Families of captives on both sides hold on to to hope
As Israelis woke up to the news that the war was back on, hundreds of people gathered in a square in central Tel Aviv where the families of hostages and their supporters have kept vigil since the crisis began.
Some families of Israeli hostages still held by Hamas voiced sorrow on Friday at the resumption of fighting.
"I feel very bad about the whole issue," said Yoav Shelhav, from the Nahal Oz kibbutz, where two residents were abducted in the Hamas attack eight weeks ago. Two men from the kibbutz, Omri Miran and Tzahi Idan, remain in captivity. Shelhav said Idan is a distant cousin of his.
"I think our main concern should be getting back not just these two guys, but everyone." he said. "I think this should be the first priority. The issue with Hamas is important, it should be resolved, but it can be second priority."
Shelhav said he remains hopeful more hostages will eventually be freed: "I have no actual idea of them, if they are still alive or not, but I have hope."
Nihal Deeba lives in East Jerusalem, part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. One of her two sons, 17-year-old Malik, was released from an Israeli jail as part of the truce, but another, 20-year-old Arafat, is still behind bars. Both were accused of stone-throwing, which they deny.
"We are all upset, for our people and for the situation we are in," she said. "I just pray to God that he has mercy on the people in Gaza, and protects them, and that things go back to being peaceful.
"We have hope that there will be another truce, that all the prisoners will be released, and that things calm down."
Deeba said that she had really been hoping her older son, Arafat, would be released as well.
"I still have that hope," she said. "I pray that all the prisoners are freed, and that the prisons are emptied."
Scott Neuman, Brian Mann and Daniel Estrin reported from Tel Aviv. Becky Sullivan reported from Washington, D.C. Anas Baba contributed reporting from Rafah, the Gaza Strip, and Fatima Al-Kassab contributed reporting from London.
|
Sinwar in 2023
|
|
| Hamas Chief in the Gaza Strip[1] | |
|---|---|
| Assumed office 13 February 2017 |
|
| Prime Minister | |
| Leader | Ismail Haniyeh |
| Preceded by | Ismail Haniyeh |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 29 October 1962 Khan Younis, Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip |
| Political party | Hamas |
| Residence(s) | Khan Younis, Khan Younis Governorate, Gaza Strip, State of Palestine[2] |
| Education | Islamic University of Gaza |
Yahya Sinwar (Arabic: يحيى السنوار, romanized: Yaḥyá al-Sanwār; born 29 October 1962), also spelled Yehya Sinwar,[3] is a Palestinian politician who has been leader of Hamas, the Sunni Islamist political and military organization that rules the Gaza Strip, since 2017.[4][5]
He was born in the Khan Yunis refugee camp in Egyptian-ruled Gaza in 1962 to a family who had been expelled or fled from Ashkelon during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.[6] He finished his studies at the Islamic University of Gaza where he received a bachelor's degree in Arabic Studies.[7]
For orchestrating the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians he considered to be collaborators in 1989, he was sentenced to four life sentences by Israel, of which he served 22 years until his release among 1,026 others in a 2011 prisoner exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.[4] Sinwar was one of the co-founders of the security apparatus of Hamas.[8][9][10][11] In 2017, he was elected the leader of Hamas, and claimed to pursue "peaceful, popular resistance" to the Israeli occupation the following year, a position which was later abandoned.[12] He was re-elected as the leader of Hamas in 2021, and was subject to an assassination attempt by Israel that year. Sinwar is regarded as the mastermind behind the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.[13][14][15][16]
In September 2015, Sinwar was designated a terrorist by the United States government,[8] and Hamas and the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades have also been designated terrorist organisations by the United States, the European Union and other countries. In May 2024, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) applied for arrest warrants for Sinwar and several other Hamas and Israeli leaders as part of the ICC investigation in Palestine, citing charges of "extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape, and sexual assault in detention."[17]
Early life and education of Yahya Sinwar
Sinwar was born Yahya Ibrahim Hassan al-Sinwar in 1962, in the Khan Yunis refugee camp, when the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian rule, where he spent his early years. His family were expelled or fled from Al-Majdal Asqalan (Ashkelon) during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and sought refuge in the Gaza Strip. After he graduated from high school at Khan Yunis Secondary School for Boys, he went on to the Islamic University of Gaza where he received a bachelor's degree in Arabic Studies.[18][19] His younger brother is Mohammed Sinwar, who is a military leader in Hamas.
Early career of Yahya Sinwar
Sinwar was first arrested in 1982 for subversive activities and he served several months in the Far'a prison where he met other Palestinian activists, including Salah Shehade, and dedicated himself to the Palestinian cause.[18] 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".[18]
Sinwar's killing of suspected collaborators with Israel gained him the nickname "The Butcher of Khan Yunis".[20][21][22]
In 1988, Sinwar planned the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers and the murder of four Palestinians whom he suspected of cooperating with Israel. He was arrested on February that year; during questioning he admitted to strangling two of the victims, inadvertently killing another during a violent interrogation, and accidentally shooting the fourth during an attempted abduction, and showed investigators an orchard where the four bodies were buried.[23] He was sentenced to four life sentences in 1989.[5][8] He tried to escape several times but was always caught.
In 2008, while serving a prison sentence, he was operated on by Israeli doctors[24] to remove a tumor in his brain to save his life.[19][25][26] Sinwar served 22 years of his sentence, and was the most senior Palestinian prisoner freed among 1,026 others in a 2011 prisoner exchange for IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been held hostage by Hamas for five years.[4][27]
In November 2012, during the 2012 Israeli operation in the Gaza Strip, Sinwar met Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani in Tehran[28] and after his 2017 election as the group's leader in Gaza he cultivated closer cooperation between Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.[29][30] In 2015, he is believed to have overseen the torture and execution of fellow Hamas commander Mahmoud Ishtiwi, who was accused of embezzlement and homosexuality.[20] Ishtwi was reportedly whipped, suspended from a ceiling for hours across multiple days, and ultimately killed by being shot with three bullets to the chest. [31]
Leadership of Hamas in the Gaza Strip (2017–present)
In February 2017, Sinwar was secretly elected the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, taking over from Ismail Haniyeh. In March, he established a Hamas-controlled administrative committee for the Gaza Strip, opposing power sharing with the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. Sinwar rejects any reconciliation with Israel.[4] He has called on militants to capture more Israeli soldiers.[8] 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.[32] More recently he has silenced hard-line voices in Gaza, ordering against the use of tunnels that Muhammad Deif wanted to use to sneak fighters into Israel before they were shut down by new classified Israeli technology in 2017.[12]
On 16 May 2018, in an unexpected announcement on Al Jazeera, Sinwar stated that Hamas would pursue "peaceful, popular resistance" to the Israeli occupation, opening the possibility that Hamas, which is considered a terrorist organisation by many countries, may play a role in negotiations with Israel.[12] A week earlier he had encouraged Gazans to breach the Israeli siege, saying "We would rather die as martyrs than die out of oppression and humiliation", and adding, "We are ready to die, and tens of thousands will die with us."[33]
On 1 December 2020, Sinwar tested positive for COVID-19 and was reportedly following the advice of health authorities and taking precautionary measures. A spokesman for the group also said that he was in "good health and [...] pursuing his duties as usual."[34]
In March 2021, he was elected to a second four-year term as the head of Hamas Gaza branch in an election held in secret. He is the highest-ranking Hamas official in Gaza and Gaza's de facto ruler, as well as the second most powerful member of Hamas after Haniyeh.[35]
On 15 May 2021, an Israeli airstrike was reported to have hit the home of the Hamas leader; there were no immediate details of any deaths or injured. The strike took place in the Khan Yunis region of southern Gaza in the midst of evergrowing tension between Israelis and Palestinians.[36] However, in the week that followed, he appeared publicly at least four times. The most obvious and daring thereof was in a press conference on 27 May 2021, when he mentioned (on air) that he will go home after the press conference (on foot), and invited the Israeli Minister of defense to take the decision to assassinate him in the following 60 minutes, until he reaches his home. Sinwar spent the next hour wandering in Gaza streets and having selfie photos with the public.[37]
2023 Israel–Hamas war
Sinwar—along with Mohammed Deif—is regarded as the mastermind behind the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, the deadliest attack in Israeli history.[13][14][15] The attack left around 1,200 people dead and about 240 taken as hostages in Gaza. Following the attack, Sinwar was put under EU terrorist sanctions[38] and became a top target for assassination by the Israeli military.[39] Israeli intelligence presumes Sinwar is hiding in a complex system of tunnels beneath Gaza and is surrounded by hostages acting as human shields.[40]
After three weeks of conflict in the 2023 Israel–Hamas war, Sinwar proposed the release of all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli confinement in exchange for the release of all the hostages kidnapped in the conflict.[41][42] Sinwar reportedly visited the hostages in the early days of the war promising they would not be harmed.[43] When one of the hostages, Yocheved Lifshitz, said Sinwar should be ashamed of himself, he was silent.[43]
On November 7, after Israel had surrounded Gaza City, it claimed it had "trapped" Sinwar in a bunker there.[44] Israeli military authorities later claimed he was in Khan Yunis in an underground bunker.[45] Leaflets allegedly dropped by Israel into Gaza proclaimed a bounty of $400,000 for providing information on Sinwar's location.[46] According to Reuters, Israel is demanding the exile of Sinwar, Deif, and four other Hamas leaders from Gaza as a condition for a ceasefire.[47]
By February 2024 the IDF believed that Sinwar had moved to Rafah from Khan Younis. According to the IDF, Sinwar is constantly on the move and thus is unable to personally command Hamas forces.[48] On 13 February 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. IDF stated that they are collecting intelligence and interrogating Hamas commanders and their relatives to find Sinwar.[49]
On 20 May 2024, an arrest warrant was launched against Sinwar by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on several counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.[50][51]
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Some Israeli hostages are coming home. What will their road to recovery look like?
A man wearing an Israeli flag looks toward ambulances outside a hospital in Petah Tikva, Israel, on Nov. 24.
Hamas has released over 100 of the more than 240 people it kidnapped from Israel on Oct. 7 as part of a hostage and prisoner exchange enabled by the weeklong cease-fire that ended on Friday. Those freed in Gaza were mostly women and children, including some foreign nationals.
At the same time, hundreds of Arab residents of the West Bank who had been held in prisons by Israel have been freed. This has created two sets of populations, including many children, in need of psychological support as they return to freedom.
How Israel is welcoming — and treating — the freed hostages
In Israel, as the freed hostages return home, Israeli and U.S. media have been awash with photos and videos of their emotional reunions with surviving loved ones (including some pets) as well as emerging details about their nearly two months in captivity
Most hostages have not spoken with the media directly, though accounts from family members suggest at least some were given limited access to food, beds, bathrooms and medications. One 84-year-old woman was returned to Israel over the weekend in critical condition.
Physical health is the top priority
In anticipation of the release of hostages, Israel's health ministry worked with child trauma specialists to come up with a handbook for how people should interact with them.
Ayelet Noam-Rosenthal, a social worker at the Haruv Institute in Jerusalem and one of the authors of the guide, says it includes protocols for "everyone that will meet the child," from parents to pediatricians to teachers.
"Here in Israel after the horrific events of Oct. 7, where children were kidnapped after witnessing massacre and severe violence, we actually understood that we have to focus also on the day after," she told NPR. "That means the day after they return, and address both their immediate and long-term needs."
The Times of Israel reports that the new protocols cover best practices for both the hours and weeks after hostages are released.
It has instructions for the Israeli soldiers accompanying children on their way to the hospital, including how to introduce themselves and how to answer (or deflect) their questions, CNN reported.
Hostages are to be brought to one of six Israeli hospitals, where they can reunite with family members and receive a suitcase with some of their clothing, medications and personal items. They also receive a thorough medical exam, which the Times reports must be performed by female doctors.
The guide says those exams should check for evidence of rape or torture, and that if any is found, "appropriate professionals" should be consulted on whether it would be possible collect the evidence or interview the patient without re-traumatizing them.
There is also guidance on proper nutrition and avoiding potentially-fatal refeeding syndrome, which can happen when food is reintroduced to a malnourished person.
Liz Cathcart, the executive director of the nonprofit Hostage U.S. (which supports families of Americans taken hostage but cannot comment on which cases it is working on) says malnutrition is common among hostages.
That could be due to a lack of nutritious food and food in general or the inability to keep food down because of stress.
Other potential issues include vitamin deficiencies, diseases contracted in captivity and sleep disturbances, according to Hostage U.S.
The physical health of the hostages is the immediate priority, Cathcart tells NPR.
"Without the physical health checks and making sure that your physical health is up to par, you're not able to then take the next steps to recovery and reintegration," she says.
Rebuilding trust and autonomy are crucial and take time
Noam-Rosenthal says parents and professionals should take every precaution to avoid re-traumatizing children who were held captive.
"We must all work together to strengthen the child's resilience and work toward his or her adjustment to the new circumstances," she says.
For instance, the Times reports that while doctors can evaluate whether adults are healthy enough to recount their experience to law enforcement, the "debriefing of children will be delayed for some time."
Noam-Rosenthal says it's crucial to rebuild trust "because that's one of the things these children lost along the way."
One of the first things her team tells family members is that they need to give children their autonomy back — for example, letting them set the pace for physical touch, even if the parents are desperate to hug them immediately.
Longer-term, she says it's important for parents and professionals to work together in support of the child's well-being. She called for full coordination of "the military, the health and the social services as one system driven by the same goal."
Building resilience and coping skills are key to helping former captives adjust to their new normal, Cathcart says.
And it's not just the hostages themselves who need help. Families of hostages are coming off a "two-month marathon" of worrying about and fighting for their loved ones' release, Cathcart says.
Before they can shift their focus to that person's recovery, she says, they need to take care of themselves too.
"What I always encourage families to do when their loved one gets home is to focus on yourself, too, because it's so important that the families are mentally healthy, that they're fed, that they have energy," she adds. "Because if they don't, they're not going to be able to support their family member."
Hostage U.S. recommends that hostages and their families work to "establish a routine without being regimented," think through potential triggers (like loud noises or dark rooms), communicate openly and be patient throughout the reintegration process.
"The use of simple words and short sentences is important," the ministry advises, according to CNN. "It is important to convey that we are open and able to hear and talk about difficult things."
Children in Gaza are struggling with mental health too
As part of the temporary truce, Israel released 240 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom are minors.
Prior to Oct. 7, some 500-700 Palestinian children were subjected to Israeli military detention every year, in some cases without charge, trial or due process guarantees, according to Save the Children.
The organization welcomed the release of both Israeli and Palestinian children as part of the deal.
But Jason Lee, Save the Children's country director in the Palestinian Territories, called it "just the first step needed" in addressing a decades-old crisis affecting children in the region.
"A lasting ceasefire must be agreed immediately, all hostages in Gaza must be released, and the appalling emotional and physical abuse of Palestinian children in detention must end," he added.
More than 13,300 Palestinians — roughly two-thirds of them women and minors — have been killed since the war began, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza. The count does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The United Nations has warned that Gaza is becoming a "graveyard for children," while the World Health Organization has raised alarms about the spread of infectious diseases in the territory.
And researchers are worried about the toll the war will take on the mental health and development of the children who do survive.
Studies conducted before the current conflict documented especially high rates of mental and behavioral health issues among Gaza's youth, who make up nearly half of its population.
- gaza
- hostages
- prisoner swap
- recovery
- israel-hamas war
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An Opening Between Israel And Gaza — For Now
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/13/795995521/an-opening-between-israel-and-gaza-for-now
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In pictures: emotional scenes as Israel and Hamas trade prisoners for hostages
Israel and Hamas are taking initial steps toward an agreement to calm hostilities — and it's allowing thousands of Palestinians from Gaza to go work in Israel daily.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
It's a picture we haven't seen in years - Palestinians in Gaza lining up in large numbers to go work in Israel. That route has usually been closed, as Israel and Hamas have battled for a decade. Now they're working on an arrangement, an indirect arrangement to cool things down. NPR's Daniel Estrin is in Gaza. He joins me now. Hey, Daniel.
DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: Hi, Mary Louise.
KELLY: So what is this agreement, indirect or not, that they're trying to come up with?
ESTRIN: Well, for starters, they're not calling it an agreement. They're refusing to call it that because they don't recognize each other as legitimate entities. I asked a spokesman from Hamas today, what is this? And here's how he described it.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Through interpreter) It's not a cease-fire. It's not an agreement. It's quiet for quiet.
ESTRIN: So quiet in exchange for quiet, which means Hamas, which is a militant group, is agreeing to prevent rocket attacks on Israel and to prevent confrontations with Israeli soldiers at the Israeli fence separating Israel from Gaza. So we're not going to see any more fiery kites and rock-throwing, and protests there are on hold. And in return, Israel is starting to let Gaza breathe a little, and it's relaxing restrictions that they put on Gaza for years ever since Hamas took power there.
KELLY: So it sounds like this quiet for quiet deal, or whatever you want to call it, is already changing some things. I mean, you're there. What are you seeing that looks different than it might have a couple of weeks ago?
ESTRIN: Already tons of changes. I drove up to the Israeli border crossing with Gaza yesterday, and usually, the parking lot there is pretty sleepy because Israel prevents most Palestinians from leaving Gaza into Israel. But when I arrived, there were scores of Palestinians crossing into Israel. They were hopping into minibuses, and they were going to cities all around Israel. Let's listen.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Speaking non-English language).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Speaking non-English language).
ESTRIN: Drivers are calling out Tel Aviv and other cities in Israel. It's really - it was an astonishing scene because for years, very few Palestinians have been allowed to come from Gaza to Israel to work. And now officials here are saying that Israel is very quietly allowing in more than 5,000 laborers, you know, to do very menial jobs. But they earn about 10 times as much as they could in Gaza.
KELLY: Wow. Although - am I right in thinking that the Gaza Strip is still fenced off? It's still restricted for those people who aren't able to take advantage of finding jobs in Israel. There's still a couple of million people there, right?
ESTRIN: It's true. This is starting to ease some pressure in Gaza for the lucky few who can get these permits to leave. But it is - for average people, it's a drop in the bucket. People are out of jobs in very high numbers. Water is undrinkable. And people here are very aware that, you know, violence could start up again, and all these changes could just disappear in a moment's notice.
KELLY: Thank you, Daniel.
ESTRIN: You're welcome.
KELLY: NPR's Daniel Estrin reporting there from Gaza City.
In Gaza, a hidden threat could kill Palestinians even after a cease-fire
KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip and TEL AVIV, Israel — When the Abu Samur family returned to their neighborhood of southern Gaza last month, after Israeli troops withdrew from the immediate area, they found their house mostly destroyed. Only the bathroom was intact.
That's where 14-year-old Mohammed Abu Samur — always curious, exploring, investigating — found what he says he thought was a bottle of perfume or deodorant.
It was black, metal, like an aerosol can. His father Yasser Abu Samur, 48, thought it looked suspicious, and told his son to throw it away, the father recalls. But it was too late.
"It exploded on me. It exploded on me and my siblings," Mohammed, wrapped in bandages, told NPR in an interview this month from his gurney at the European Hospital in Khan Younis.
As Palestinians like the Abu Samur family venture back into areas of Gaza that have been obliterated by months of combat, international organizations and aid groups say there's a hidden threat: unexploded ordnance.
The rule of thumb, explosives experts say, is that 10% of munitions do not detonate on impact. That means an estimated 7,500 metric tons of live munition may be scattered throughout the Gaza Strip, according to the United Nations.
"It's everything from mortars, artillery shells and grenades to improvised rockets and bombs and missiles," says Mungo Birch, head of the U.N. Mine Action Service (UNMAS) in the Palestinian territories. "One of the most dangerous times is when people return home."
These weapons could continue to kill and maim Palestinians even if a cease-fire eventually ends the Israel-Hamas war. The U.N. estimates it could take 14 years to make Gaza safe from these bombs.
Unexploded ordnance has long been a danger in Gaza
Explosives experts of Hamas lay out unexploded projectiles from the aftermath of the May 2021 conflict with Israel, at a local police precinct in Gaza City on June 5, 2021.
When Hamas-led militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, Birch happened to already be in Gaza. He was working on clearing unexploded ordnance left over from a 2021 conflict there.
Munitions have been left by both Hamas and Israel, he says. Much of it is hidden in what the U.N. estimates is 37 million metric tons of debris.
"There's now more rubble in Gaza than there is in Ukraine," Birch says. "And to put that in perspective, the front line in Ukraine is about 600 miles and Gaza is 25 miles long."
When a U.N. team inspected Khan Younis, the area where the Abu Samur family lives, they said they found 1,000-pound bombs, unexploded, in main intersections and inside schools.
"I was in Sarajevo in '92, I was in Baghdad in 2003, I was in Kabul. But nothing can compare to what we saw in Gaza," says Erik Tollefsen, an explosives expert who served in the Norwegian military and is now with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). He was in Gaza in February and March.
"It's just breathtaking, the level of destruction. It's really horrifying," he says.
Tollefsen found an unexploded artillery shell just 6 feet from the door of the ICRC office in Gaza City, he says. One day, while driving past a camp for displaced Palestinians, he spotted a tent pegged with an unexploded missile. Children were playing around it, he recalls.
Normally, to get rid of explosives, you actually need more explosives — to set off a controlled detonation. But explosives are not on the list of materials Israel currently allows aid workers to carry into Gaza.
So Tollefsen brings his own climbing gear and fishing hooks. He uses them to gingerly drag bombs away from people's tents. But without heavy equipment, he can't dispose of the bombs.
"We just have to leave them there," he says. "I find that quite disturbing, that we can't help them any other way."
Aid workers are mapping the location of dangerous munitions and sending out warnings on social media. But with electricity scarce and 4G connectivity limited in Gaza right now, they're also posting stickers and circulating leaflets.
"Children are very curious. They see with their hands. They touch things," Tollefsen notes. "That makes them extremely vulnerable."
What happened to 14-year-old Mohammed Abu Samur
Fourteen-year-old Mohammed Abu Samur found what he thought was a bottle of perfume or deodorant. He lost his left hand below the elbow, and all the fingers on his right hand.
When what he thought was a perfume bottle exploded, Mohammed lost his left hand below the elbow, and all the fingers on his right hand. It took four doctors and seven hours of surgery to salvage his legs.
But they say he may still lose them to infection, in Gaza's collapsed health system.
When NPR visited Mohammed's hospital bedside, in early May, his wounds hadn't been cleaned in several days. Flies swarmed around his face, pockmarked by shrapnel. His bandages had turned yellow and green.
Weapons experts tell NPR that the black metal canister Mohammed thought was perfume or deodorant was probably the fuse for an anti-tank mine — possibly a model made in the U.S. Israel uses them to demolish what it says are buildings and tunnels used by Hamas.
Some of those fuses have also been mistaken for canned food, as famine spreads across Gaza.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, in line with government protocol, an Israeli military spokesperson told NPR that soldiers do take munitions off the battlefield with them when they withdraw, "where it is feasible."
But experts say so much remains behind, and many more curious youngsters like Mohammed are likely to pay the price for this war.
Frayer reported from Tel Aviv, and Baba reported from Khan Younis and Rafah City
A Palestinian prisoner hugs his mother after being released from an Israeli jail in exchange for Israeli hostages released by Hamas from the Gaza Strip, in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank on Nov. 26, 2023.
In Saturday's second round of hostage-for-prisoner exchanges, Hamas freed 17 hostages and Israel released 39 Palestinian detainees.
Meanwhile inside Gaza hundreds of thousands of civilians have been living for weeks without power, food and water or medical supplies.
The U.N. says more than 250 supply trucks entered Gaza Saturday — sixty of them reaching northern Gaza where the fighting has been intense.
Ambulances also reached Al Shifa hospital, now controlled by Israel's army, to help with evacuations. Israel says the war against Hamas will resume at the end of this temporary cease fire - a response to Hamas's October 7 attack. In a statement the U.N. said the longer the pause lasts, the more aid humanitarian will reach Gaza civilians.
A crowd surrounds a Red Cross bus carrying Palestinian prisoners released from Israeli jails in exchange for hostages released by Hamas from the Gaza Strip, in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank on Nov. 26, 2023.
Palestinian prisoner Khalil Zama' (R) hugs a relative after being released from an Israeli jail in exchange for Israeli hostages released by Hamas from the Gaza Strip, at his home in Halhul village north Hebron in the occupied West Bank on Nov. 27, 2023
People waves Israeli flags as a helicopter carrying hostages released by Hamas from Gaza arrives at the helipad of the Schneider Children's Medical Center in Petah Tikva, Israel on Nov. 26, 2023.
Palestinians prisoners cheer among supporters after being released from Israeli jails in exchange for hostages released by Hamas from the Gaza Strip, in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank early on Nov. 26, 2023.
Israa Jaabis, center, a Palestinian prisoner released by Israel, is hugged by relatives as she arrives home in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabel Mukaber, early Sunday Nov. 26, 2023.
An International Red Cross vehicle carrying hostages released by Hamas drives towards the Rafah border point with Egypt ahead of their transfer to Israel on Nov. 25, 2023.
Palestinian prisoners released by Israel are welcomed to the West Bank town of Al Bireh Sunday Nov. 26, 2023.
A convoy carrying Israeli hostages released by Hamas from the Gaza Strip arrives at the Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan, on Nov. 26, 2023.
Shuruq Dwayat, left, a Palestinian prisoner released by Israel, is hugged by relatives as she arrives home in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sur Bahar, early Nov. 26, 2023.
A screen grab captured from a video shows the release of Israeli hostages as part of the exchange agreement during the four-day humanitarian pause in Gaza City, Gaza on Nov. 26, 2023.
A man climbs on the side as Red Cross staff and Palestinians prisoners released from Israeli jails in exchange for hostages released by Hamas from the Gaza Strip, stand inside a bus as they are welcomed by crowds in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank early on Nov. 26, 2023.
Sharon Hertzman (R) hugs a relative as they reunite at Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan, Israel on Nov. 25, 2023. Sharon Hertzman and her daughter Noam, 12 years old, not pictured, were released by Hamas after being held as hostages in Gaza for 50 days.
Asil al-Titi, a 23-year-old former prisoner from the occupied West Bank, sits between her two brothers on Nov. 25, 2023 at the famiy home in the Balata refugee camp, one day after her release from Israeli jail in exchange for hostages held in Gaza by Hamas.
In Beutunia, West Bank, released prisoners are greeted by chanting jubilant Palestinian crowds on Nov. 24, 2023.
Palestinians cheer for the return of the prisoners in Beitunia, West Bank on Nov. 24, 2023.
In Beitunia, West Bank people wait for Palestinian prisoners to be released on Nov. 24, 2023.
This is Israeli Ofer Prison. It is where Palestinian prisoners who are part of the hostages-for-prisoners exchange with Israel would be driven out by International Committee of the Red Cross buses on Nov. 24, 2023.
Israelis gather to witness the first batch of hostages released being brought to Schneider Hospital via helicopter.
Released Israeli hostages are brought to Schneider Hospital via helicopter in Petah Tikvah, Israel.
Israelis gather to witness the first batch of hostages released being brought to Schneider Hospital via helicopter.
Hadas Calderon, right, who's children and ex husband are being held hostage in Gaza holds a sign that reads the 'power of mothers' outside Israel main army base on Nov. 24, 2023 in Tel Aviv, Israel
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Volunteers sell yellow flowers to benefit hostage families in the square in front of the Tel Aviv museum.
Photos: Campus protests continue, police make arrests and clear encampments
University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are among the latest campuses to witness police action linked to the war in Gaza.
In Cambridge, police in riot gear dismantled a Pro-Palestinian encampment on the MIT campus early this morning. At least 10 students were arrested. It was a similar scene at Penn in Philadelphia.
In Tucson last night, campus police tear-gassed protestors and tore down their encampment.
We take a look at some other schools from the week.
Washington
Following a talk by Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, supporters clashed with University of Washington students and protesters who barricaded the east entrance to the encampment for Palestine on the Quad on Tuesday, May 7, 2024, in Seattle.
'14,500 dead children' is written in red paint on a handmade sign within the 'Popular University for Gaza liberated zone,' on Tuesday, May 7, 2024, at the University of Washington campus Quad in Seattle.
Following a talk by Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, supporters clashed with University of Washington students and protesters who barricaded the east entrance to the encampment for Palestine on the Quad on Tuesday, May 7, 2024, in Seattle.
University of Washington students and protesters amassed at the encampment for Palestine, also known as the 'Popular University for Gaza liberated zone,' on the campus Quad on Tuesday, May 7, 2024.
An eye wash station and medic tent are shown at the encampment for Palestine on the University of Washington Quad on Tuesday, May 7, 2024, in Seattle.
The east entrance to the University of Washington Quad and encampment for Palestine is shown barricaded following a talk by Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk at UW's HUB on Tuesday, May 7, 2024, in Seattle.
Pro-Palestinian protesters march on George Washington University's campus in Washington, D.C. on May 9, 2024.
Pro-Palestinian protestors hug each other on George Washington University's campus in Washington, D.C. on May 9, 2024.
Protestors and police face each other during protests on George Washington University's campus in Washington, D.C. on May 9, 2024.
Pro-Palestinian protesters continue demonstration on George Washington University's campus in Washington, D.C. on May 9, 2024.
Pro-Palestinian protesters on George Washington University's campus in Washington, D.C. on May 9, 2024.
Some families say their relatives lost weight and came home with head lice. One man said his aunt had to readjust to sunlight after spending so much time in a tunnel. The families of two young girls said they only spoke in whispers upon their arrival because they had been told not to make noise in captivity.
Family members of several hostages of all ages described them as physically but not mentally OK in interviews with NPR. Many are returning home to learn that their loved ones were killed on Oct. 7 or are still being held in Gaza.
For many, feelings of relief are mixed with those of guilt and exhaustion. And relatives and experts have voiced concern about the potential long-term effects of the ordeal on hostages, particularly young children.
That's what the family of four-year-old Abigail Idan — a dual American-Israeli citizen whose parents were among the some 1,200 people killed on Oct. 7 — told NPR. Her great-aunt Liz Hirsh Naftali said Idan is "overjoyed" to be back with her siblings, but declined to elaborate on her condition.
"I think that we will only learn as the days go on, and for a long time, what really effectively will be the results of having been a hostage and having been in her father's arms when he was murdered," Hirsh Naftali said.
Experts told NPR that the road to recovery from such an experience can be long, but there are steps that caregivers, loved ones and professionals can take to help children who were held hostage navigate a path forward.