“A smart guy who ended up making a mistake.”
With this phrase, a former employee of the Israeli intelligence service (Mossad) tried to describe the relatively “ignominous” end of Yahya Sinwar.
Asked why he thought it took more than a year for Israeli forces to find and kill the most wanted man, Yossi Alfer admitted that Sinuar was a “very intelligent enemy”.
“He understood the need to hide in the depths of the tunnels… which he built right under our noses, without our intelligence knowing how deep and extensive they really were. And he took advantage of it very well”, he said.
“He was a smart agent who ultimately made a mistake,” says Alfer.
Sinwar is believed to be hiding in Hamas tunnels throughout the Gaza Strip.
He never stayed in the same place for long and avoided any communication that involved modern technology. He depended on messengers.
Human shields
It is also believed that the Hamas leader was constantly surrounded by (remaining) hostages, which he used as human shields, which would have prevented the IDF from attacking him. However, the Israeli Armed Forces (IDF) reiterated in its statement that no evidence of the presence of hostages at the site of the attack was recorded.
There were conflicting reports, however, about whether Sinuar had left the tunnels during the Israel-Hamas war and whether the IDF managed to obtain footage of the Hamas leader walking through the tunnels last February.
The extermination of Sinwar was carried out by 162 Division, including 828 Bislash Brigade along with a tank
The IDF suspected that there were Hamas terrorists in the area of the building and ended up opening fire. Then they found Sinuar’s body there.
One of the terrorists targeted in the IDF attack on Gaza was Hamas division commander Khan Younis, who has been constantly close to Sinwar since the start of the war.
The IDF also believes that Sinuar remained in the tunnel with the six dead hostages, who were located in Rafah.
And this is where he may have gone wrong. According to the IDF, after the execution of the hostages, it began to move without using the hostages as human shields.
The “Bin Laden of Gaza”
The ascetic, with white hair and thick black eyebrows, prevailed over the years and changed the balance of power in the field. Otherwise, “the face of the devil” or “the living dead”, or Bin Laden of Gaza, according to the Israeli military, has not appeared in public since October 2023.
Since 2017, he has been the head of Gaza Strip affairs and de facto leader, before replacing Ismail Haniya as head of the Politburo in 2024. Sinwar was one of the first to help establish the armed wing of Hamas.
He was born in 1962 in the Han Younis refugee camp in the south of the Gaza Strip. His family was displaced in the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948 from Mazdal Ascalan, now Ashkelon, after the creation of the State of Israel.
In the early 1980s he enrolled at the Islamic University of Gaza. He entered university at a time when many young Palestinians in the Gaza Strip were looking to Islam for answers to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, after decades of pan-Arab nationalism had failed to provide answers.
Student organizations that combined Islamic thought with Palestinian nationalism were developing rapidly. In 1982, Sinouar was arrested for involvement in such organizations, without formal charges being brought against him.
In 1985, before the formation of Hamas, Sinwar helped organize a network of young Islamists who took it upon themselves to expose the growing number of Palestinian informants recruited by Israel. Israeli media published excerpts from their interrogations. He narrates that he kidnapped a traitor, who was taken to the Han Younis cemetery: “I put him in a grave and strangled him with a kefiya (Palestinian scarf) (…) he knew he deserved to die”…