Who was Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader Israel says it killed?

BEIRUT (AP) — Yahya Sinwar masterminded an attack on Israel that shocked the world, unleashing a still-widening catastrophe with no end in sight.

In Gaza, no figure loomed larger in determining the war’s trajectory than the 61-year-old Hamas leader. Obsessive, disciplined and dictatorial, he was a rarely seen veteran militant who learned Hebrew over years spent in Israeli prisons and who carefully studied his enemy.

On Thursday, Israel said troops in Gaza had killed Sinwar. There was no immediate confirmation from Hamas of his death.

The secretive figure feared on both sides of the battle lines engineered the surprise Oct. 7, 2023, attack into southern Israel, along with the even more shadowy Mohammed Deif, head of Hamas’ armed wing. Israel said that it killed Deif in a July airstrike in southern Gaza that killed more than 70 Palestinians.

Soon after, Hamas’ leader in exile, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed while visiting Iran in an explosion that was blamed on Israel. Sinwar was then chosen to take his place as Hamas’ top leader, though he was in hiding in Gaza.

Palestinian militants who carried out the October 2023 attack killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250 others, catching Israel’s military and intelligence establishment off guard and shattering the image of Israeli invincibility.

Israel’s retaliation was crushing. The conflict has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, caused widespread destruction in Gaza, and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless and many on the verge of starvation.

Sinwar has held indirect negotiations with Israel to try to end the war. One of his goals was to win the release of thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli jails, much like the deal that got him released more than a decade ago.

He worked on bringing Hamas closer to Iran and its other allies across the region. The war he ignited drew in Hezbollah, eventually leading to another Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and led Iran and Israel to trade fire directly for the first time, raising fears of an even more expansive conflict.

To Israelis, Sinwar was a nightmarish figure. The Israeli army’s chief spokesperson, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, called him a murderer “who proved to the whole world that Hamas is worse than ISIS,” referring to the Islamic State group.

Always defiant, Sinwar ended one of his few public speeches by inviting Israel to assassinate him, proclaiming in Gaza, “I will walk back home after this meeting.” He then did so, shaking hands and taking selfies with people in the streets.

Among Palestinians, he was respected for standing up to Israel and remaining in impoverished Gaza, in contrast to other Hamas leaders living more comfortably abroad.

But he was also deeply feared for his iron grip in Gaza, where public dissent is suppressed.

In contrast to the media-friendly personas cultivated by some of Hamas’ political leadership, Sinwar never sought to build a public image. He was known as the “Butcher of Khan Younis” for his brutal approach to Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel.

Sinwar was born in 1962 in Gaza’s Khan Younis refugee camp to a family that was among hundreds of thousands of Palestinians driven from what is now Israel during the 1948 war surrounding its creation.

He was an early member of Hamas, which emerged from the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1987, when the coastal enclave was under Israeli military occupation.

Sinwar convinced the group’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, that to succeed as a resistance organization, Hamas needed to be purged of informants for Israel. They founded a security arm, then known as Majd, which Sinwar led.

Arrested by Israel in the late 1980s, he admitted under interrogation to having killed 12 suspected collaborators. He was eventually sentenced to four life terms for offenses that included the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers.

Michael Koubi, a former director of the investigations department at Israel’s Shin Bet security agency who interrogated Sinwar, recalled the confession that stood out to him the most: Sinwar recounted forcing a man to bury his own brother alive because he was suspected of working for Israel.

“His eyes were full of happiness when he told us this story,” Koubi said.

But to fellow prisoners, Sinwar was charismatic, sociable and shrewd, open to detainees from all political factions.

He became the leader of the hundreds of imprisoned Hamas members. He organized strikes to improve conditions. He learned Hebrew and studied Israeli society. He was known for feeding fellow inmates, making kunafa, a treat of shredded dough stuffed with cheese.

“Being a leader inside prison gave him experience in negotiations and dialogue, and he understood the mentality of the enemy and how to affect it,” said Anwar Yassine, a Lebanese citizen who spent about 17 years in Israeli jails, much of the time with Sinwar.

Yassine noted how Sinwar always treated him with respect even though he belonged to the Lebanese Communist Party, whose secular principles conflicted with Hamas’ ideology.

During his years in detention, Sinwar wrote a 240-page novel, “Thistle and the Cloves.” It tells the story of Palestinian society from the 1967 Mideast war until 2000, when the second intifada began.

“This is not my personal story, nor is it the story of a specific person, despite the fact that all the incidents are true,” Sinwar wrote in the novel’s opening.

In 2008, Sinwar survived an aggressive form of brain cancer after treatment at a Tel Aviv hospital.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released him in 2011 along with about 1,000 other prisoners in exchange for Gilad Schalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in a cross-border raid. Netanyahu was harshly criticized for releasing dozens of prisoners held for involvement in deadly attacks.

Back in Gaza, Sinwar closely coordinated between Hamas’ political leadership and its military wing, the Qassam Brigades. He also cultivated a reputation for ruthlessness. He is widely believed to be behind the unprecedented 2016 killing of another top Hamas commander, Mahmoud Ishtewi, in an internal power struggle.

He also married after his release.

In 2017, he was elected head of Hamas’ political bureau in Gaza. Sinwar worked with Haniyeh to realign the group with Iran and its allies, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah. He also focused on building Hamas’ military power.

FILE - Yahya Sinwar, head of Hamas in Gaza, delivers a speech during at a hall on the seaside of Gaza City, on April 30, 2022. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

FILE - Yahya Sinwar speaks to foreign correspondents in his office in Gaza City on May 10, 2018. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra, File)

FILE - Yahya Sinwar, head of Hamas in Gaza, greets his supporters upon his arrival at a meeting on the seaside of Gaza City, on April 30, 2022. (AP Photo/Adel Hana, File)

FILE - Yahya Sinwar, Palestinian leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, places his hand over his heart on stage after greeting supporters at a rally on May 24, 2021, in Gaza City, the Gaza Strip. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)

Who is Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar?

FILE - Yahya Sinwar, head of Hamas in Gaza, chairs a meeting with leaders of Palestinian factions at his office in Gaza City, on April 13, 2022. (AP Photo/Adel Hana, File)

Who is Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar?

JERUSALEM (AP) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that Israel had “settled its account” with “the person who carried out the worst massacre in the history of our people since the Holocaust.”

Netanyahu said the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was an “important moment in the war” to bring home the hostages being held in Gaza. He also said anyone who surrendered weapons and assisted with the return of the hostages would be allowed to leave Gaza safely.

Still, he added, “our war has not yet ended.”

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

JERUSALEM (AP) —

Israeli forces in Gaza killed Hamas’ top leader Yahya Sinwar, a chief architect of last year's attack on Israel that sparked the war, the military said Thursday. Troops appeared to have run across him in a battle, only to discover afterwards that a body in the rubble was the man Israel has hunted for more than a year.

Sinwar has topped Israel’s most wanted list since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war just over a year ago, and his killing strikes a powerful blow to the militant group. There was no immediate confirmation from Hamas of his death.

The military confirmed Sinwar's death after conducting DNA tests on a body it said was among three militants killed Wednesday during operations in Gaza. Foreign Minister Israel Katz called Sinwar’s killing a “military and moral achievement for the Israeli army,” saying it would “create the possibility to immediately release the hostages.”

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant addressed Hamas fighters, saying it “is time to go out, release the hostages, raise your hands, surrender.”

Sinwar was one of the chief architects of Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel has vowed to kill him since the beginning of its retaliatory campaign in Gaza. He has been Hamas’ top leader inside the Gaza Strip for years, closely connected to its military wing while dramatically building up its capabilities.

An Israeli security official said it appeared that the man who turned out to be Sinwar was killed in a battle, not in a planned targeted airstrike.

Photos circulating online showed the body of a man resembling Sinwar with a gaping head wound, dressed in a military-style vest, half buried in the rubble of a destroyed building. The security official confirmed the photos were taken by Israeli security officials at the scene. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.

The Israeli news site N12 said Sinwar appears to have been killed by chance in a battle on Wednesday. It said that troops tracked a group of militants into a building, then attacked the militants with tank fire, causing the building to collapse. As troops unearthed the dead militants, they noticed that one appeared to resemble Sinwar.

Sinwar was imprisoned by Israel from the late 1980s until 2011, and during that time he underwent treatment for brain cancer – leaving Israeli authorities with extensive medical records.

President Joe Biden has been briefed on Israel’s investigation into whether it killed Sinwar, and U.S. officials have been in close contact with Israeli officials throughout Thursday morning, according to a senior administration official.

Sinwar was chosen as Hamas’s top leader in July after his predecessor, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated in an apparent Israeli strike in the Iranian capital Tehran. Israel has also claimed to have killed the head of Hamas’ military wing Mohammed Deif in an airstrike, but the group has said he survived.

The report of his death came as Israeli forces continued a more than week-old major air and ground assault in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza. On Thursday, an Israeli strike hit a school sheltering displaced Palestinians, killing at least 28 people, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

Fares Abu Hamza, head of the Gaza Health Ministry’s emergency unit in the north, said the dead included a woman and four children, correcting an earlier report of five children. He said dozens of people were wounded.

The Israeli military said it targeted a command center run by Hamas and Islamic Jihad inside the school. It provided a list of around a dozen names of people it identified as militants who were present when the strike was called in. It was not immediately possible to verify the names.

Israel has repeatedly struck tent camps and schools sheltering displaced people in Gaza. The Israeli military says it carries out precise strikes on militants and tries to avoid harming civilians, but its strikes often kill women and children.

Israel launched its campaign in Gaza to eliminate Hamas after the militants stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250 others. Some 100 captives are still inside Gaza, about a third of whom are believed to be dead.

Israel’s offensive has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. It does not differentiate between civilians and combatants but says women and children make up a little more than half of the fatalities.

Northern Gaza was the first target of Israel’s ground invasion nearly a year ago and has suffered the heaviest destruction of the war, with entire neighborhoods in Gaza City and other towns reduced to rubble. Most of the population fled after Israel issued evacuation orders in the opening days of the war, but about 400,000 are believed to have remained despite the harsh conditions.

Earlier this month, Israel once again ordered the full-scale evacuation of the north, and allowed no food aid to enter the area for around two weeks. That led many Palestinians to fear that it had adopted a surrender-or-starve strategy suggested by former Israeli generals.

Israel allowed two shipments of aid to enter the north earlier this week after the United States warned it might reduce its military aid if its ally did not do more to address the humanitarian crisis.

Since the start of the conflict, Israeli forces have launched repeated operations into Jabaliya, a densely populated urban refugee camp dating back to the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation. The military says militants have repeatedly regrouped there after major operations.

Sami Magdy reported from Cairo. AP writers Jack Jeffery in Jerusalem and Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut, contributed to this report.

Follow AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war

Palestinians line up for food distribution in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Palestinians line up for food distribution in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Palestinians line up for food distribution in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Smoke rises following Israeli bombardment in southern Lebanon as seen from northern Israel, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)

Smokes rise following an explosion in southern Lebanon as seen from northern Israel, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)

FILE - Yahya Sinwar, head of Hamas in Gaza, chairs a meeting with leaders of Palestinian factions at his office in Gaza City, on April 13, 2022. (AP Photo/Adel Hana, File)