THE NEW YORK TIMES On a recent day, the Israeli army dropped clouds of leaflets across the sky Gaza asked for information about the whereabouts of the most important leaders of the Hamas.
“The end of Hamas is near,” read the leaflets in Arabic, promising hefty rewards for anyone who helped arrest those who “brought destruction and ruin to the Gaza Strip.”
Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, topped the list and received a reward of $400,000 more than 1,500 times the average monthly salary in Gaza.
The stated goal of Israel The war is about destroying Hamas, the Palestinian armed group that rules Gaza and sparked the war by attacking Israel on October 7. But despite a military campaign that led to it almost 20,000 deaths Israel has not yet located Mr. Sinwar and other Hamas leaders believed to be key conspirators in the attack 10 weeks ago.
According to Israeli officials, Israel considers Sinwar a central player in the Oct. 7 attack that killed about 1,200 people and returned about 240 others to Gaza as prisoners. Now 50, he was one of the founders of Hamas in the late 1980s and developed a bad reputation for punishing Palestinians suspected of spying for Israel.
“He is a very tough guy, a brutal guy,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, an associate professor of political science at AlAzhar University in Gaza, who is now in Cairo.
Israeli leaflets offer Gazans up to $400,000 for information on the whereabouts of Yahya Sinwar, the top Hamas leader in the enclave. Photo: Samar Abu Elouf/The New York Time
Mr. Sinwar's stubborn commitment to his organization's Islamic ideology makes it unlikely that he will be easily defeated.
“If he is killed, he will go to heaven. He doesn’t care about his life,” said Abusada, describing Mr. Sinwar’s mindset. “Israel would be mistaken if it thought it would surrender or that Sinwar would raise a white flag.”
Israel is also searching for Mr Sinwar's brother and confidant Mohammed. He has not been seen since the war began, although the Israeli military this week released a Hamas video taken in Gaza that said he was driving a car through an underground tunnel in Gaza.
The leaflets dropped over Gaza offered $300,000 for information leading to his capture.
The pamphlets also named Rafi Salameh, a Hamas military commander, and Mohammed Deif, the leader of Hamas' armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, who is believed to have lost an eye and was seriously injured in previous Israeli assassination attempts.
Israel offered $200,000 for information about Mr. Salameh and $100,000 for Mr. Deif.
But the biggest symbolic and operational blow Israel could deal to Hamas would be killing Mr. Sinwar, according to Israeli analysts and officials. Despite the destruction of much of Hamas's infrastructure in Gaza, Mr. Sinwar still maintains some control over the group's operations and was able last month to carry out prisoner swaps with Israel negotiated by exiled Hamas leaders.
Israeli military personnel accompanied journalists on a visit to what is believed to be the largest Hamas tunnel ever discovered. Photo: Tamir Kalifa/The New York Times
Unlike most Hamas military personnel, who remained in the shadows even before the war began, Sinwar frequently attended events and gave speeches, increasing his profile among Palestinians and Israelis. His death would not only jeopardize Hamas's operations, but would almost certainly shock morale and bring joy to Israelis.
Bypassing these senior Hamas leaders will result in the government losing the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu There is tangible evidence to show its domestic audience and a growing chorus of foreign leaders calling for a ceasefire that Israel is making progress toward its goal of eliminating Hamas.
In the last ten days, about twothirds of the United Nations General Assembly passed a nonbinding resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire; The Great BritainThe France and that Germany they demanded a ceasefire; and the Biden administration has dispatched senior officials to pressure Israel to deescalate the war in the coming weeks and launch a tactical campaign focused on Hamas.
But Netanyahu has vowed to keep fighting, and Israeli officials have suggested a longer timetable that could include intensive bombing and ground maneuvers well into next year.
Israeli authorities insist they have made progress in degrading Hamas by killing thousands of its fighters, including top commanders, and destroying parts of a vast network of tunnels the group built to secretly funnel fighters and weapons across the territory to transport.
In 2011, Mr. Sinwar was released as part of an exchange of 1,026 Palestinians for an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who had been captured by Hamas five years earlier. Photo: Lynsey Addario/The New York Times
The fact that Hamas' top leaders in Gaza have so far stymied Israel's attempts to find them leaves open the possibility that they could survive the war and work to revive the group's capabilities after the guns fall silent.
Israel had already missed several opportunities to remove Mr. Sinwar from the battlefield over the years.
According to Israeli court records, he was arrested in 1988 and tried for the murder of four Palestinians suspected of spying for Israel. He spent more than two decades in prison in Israel, where he later said he spent the time getting to know his enemy: He learned Hebrew, read widely and became a leader among Palestinian prisoners.
“There is no doubt that he is stubborn and a good negotiator,” said Sofyan Abu Zaydeh, a former Palestinian official in the West Bank who met Mr. Sinwar in the late 1980s, toward the end of his 12year imprisonment.
He described Mr. Sinwar as deeply ideological. In 1993, other Palestinian factions signed preliminary peace agreements with Israel, the socalled Oslo Accords, in which they recognized Israel's right to exist and established the Palestinian Authority, a kind of governmentinwaiting. Hamas rejected these agreements and maintained its commitment to the destruction of Israel, and Sinwar refused to meet with Hamas representatives Palestinian authoritymore moderate.
“He said those who are products of Oslo I don’t recognize,” Abu Zaydeh said.
Mr. Sinwar served several life sentences but was released in 2011 as part of an exchange of 1,026 Palestinians for an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who had been captured by Hamas five years earlier.
Sinwar returned to Gaza with a commitment to release the remaining Palestinian prisoners, viewed by many Palestinians as unjustly imprisoned.
“When he left, he promised his colleagues that their freedom was his burden,” said Abu Zaydeh, who was released in 1993 and served as minister of prisoners' affairs in the Palestinian Authority. “October 7 was basically about releasing prisoners.”
Since the October attack, other Hamas leaders have said it was a central target of the attack, and last month Hamas arranged for Israel to release 240 Palestinians in exchange for 105 Israelis. About 120 hostages remain in Gaza, some of them soldiers, whom Hamas would like to exchange for other, more prominent prisoners.
Yuval Bitton, former head of Israel's Prison Services Intelligence Department, said Israel decided to release Sinwar instead of other prisoners because there was no Israeli blood on his hands. The exchange of Palestinian prisoners who killed Israelis is a very controversial issue among the Israeli public and rarely occurs.
Mr Bitton, who was on duty at the time but not yet his boss, said he had seen Mr Sinwar's ability to influence other prisoners and even events outside prison and therefore spoke out against Mr Sinwar's release.
“I told them that his release would have a very, very impact on the camp that he posed a great danger and that within a year he would be the leader of Hamas.”
He was rejected.
A tower equipped with a remotecontrolled weapon system on Israel's border wall with the northern Gaza Strip was attacked on October 7. Photo: Tamir Kalifa/The New York Times
Six years later, in 2017, Mr. Sinwar became the leader of Hamas in Gaza. He gave fiery speeches urging Palestinians to prepare guns, cleavers, axes and knives to fight Israel, and had a talent for the dramatic.
After the last war between Israel and Hamas in 2021, Sinwar announced at the end of a live televised speech that he would return home on foot and called on Israel to assassinate him. He then walked the streets of the Gaza Strip, where he was murdered. He then strolled through the streets of Gaza, waving to shopkeepers and stopping to take photos with admirers.
Perhaps his greatest tactical success in recent years, however, has been deceiving Israel into believing that it wants to avoid war and improve the lives of Gazans.
He pushed for Qatari aid to reach Gaza and to increase the number of Gazans allowed to work in Israel, both of which are desperately needed in the impoverished area. He has even kept Hamas fighters away from clashes between Israel and other militant groups.
“He was able to deceive Israel,” said Akram Attaallah, a columnist for the West Bankbased newspaper AlAyyam. “The bigger picture was that he wanted stability and development in Gaza.”
Meanwhile, Hamas was preparing for the October 7 attacks, which were the deadliest day in Israel's modern history and triggered the war in Gaza that killed an estimated 20,000 Palestinians in ten weeks.
Mr. Sinwar's whereabouts remain a mystery, as do his thoughts on the war and the future of Hamas. But people who knew him said any hope that he would surrender to end the war was in vain, no matter what that meant for civilians in the Gaza Strip.
“He will fight to the end,” said Mr. Abusada, the associate professor. “Unfortunately, the longer this continues, the more Palestinian civilians will lose.”
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