The Israeli prime minister\u00a0said Wednesday\u00a0that\u00a0Israeli forces\u00a0had\u00a0surrounded the house of Yahya Sinwar, potentially closing in on\u00a0the\u00a0top Hamas official in Gaza \u2013 and the\u00a0man most wanted by\u00a0Israeli authorities. <\/p>\n
The\u00a0Israel Defense Forces\u00a0(IDF) said Sinwar was not in the house and was believed to be hiding underground in Gaza, but\u00a0a senior adviser to\u00a0Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday that it was \u201conly a matter of time before we get him.\u201d <\/p>\n
Israel <\/strong>has publicly\u00a0accused\u00a0Sinwar\u00a0of being\u00a0the \u201cmastermind\u201d behind Hamas\u2019 terror attack\u00a0against Israel\u00a0on October 7\u00a0\u2013\u00a0though experts say he is likely one of several \u2013 making him one of the key targets of its war in Gaza. <\/p>\n A longtime figure in the Islamist Palestinian group, Sinwar was responsible for building up Hamas\u2019 military wing before forging important new ties with regional Arab powers as the group\u2019s civilian and political leader. <\/p>\n He was elected to\u00a0Hamas\u2019 main\u00a0decision-making body, the Politburo, in 2017\u00a0as the political leader of Hamas in Gaza branch. However,\u00a0he has since\u00a0become\u00a0the Politburo\u2019s de facto leader, according to\u00a0research by the European Council on Foreign Relations\u00a0(ECFR). <\/p>\n He has been designated a global terrorist by the US Department of State since 2015, and has been recently sanctioned by the United Kingdom and France. <\/p>\n Harel Chorev, senior researcher at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at\u00a0Tel Aviv University, said that while Sinwar is a key player within Hamas, he shouldn\u2019t be seen as its sole leader. <\/p>\n \u201cHe is perceived as the most senior one because he has a very high public profile, but Hamas doesn\u2019t work this way,\u201d he said. \u201cHamas is a decentralized organization with several separate power centers and he is one of them.\u201d <\/p>\n Chorev said that while Sinwar is a prominent figure, he is one of\u00a0a\u00a0\u201ctriumvirate\u201d of Hamas officials responsible for the October 7 attack, along with\u00a0Mohammed al-Masri, popularly known as\u00a0Mohammed Deif, the commander of the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military arm of Hamas, and Deif\u2019s deputy, Marwan Issa. <\/p>\n Sinwar, with his silver head of hair and dark eyes set deep under prominent eyebrows, is by far the best known and most recognizable of the three, but it was Deif who announced the October 7 attacks. <\/p>\n But while Sinwar has spent the past few years giving speeches and being photographed, Deif is an extremely secretive, shadowy figure who hasn\u2019t been seen in public in decades. <\/p>\n Sinwar was born in 1962 in a refugee camp in Khan Younis, southern Gaza. His family was displaced from\u00a0Al-Majdal, a Palestinian village in modern day Askhelon, during the Arab-Israeli war. <\/p>\n He joined Hamas in the late 1980s and became one of the founders of its feared internal intelligence apparatus, known as the Majd. <\/p>\n He was convicted in 1988 of playing a role in the murder of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians suspected of collaboration with Israel, and spent more than two decades in Israeli prison. <\/p>\n Sinwar later said he had spent those years studying his enemy, including learning to speak Hebrew. <\/p>\n He was released in 2011 as part of the deal that saw more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners exchanged for Gilad Shalit, an IDF soldier who\u00a0had been\u00a0captured and\u00a0taken\u00a0to Gaza, where he was held for more than five years. <\/p>\n At that time, Sinwar called the exchange \u201cone of the big strategic monuments in the history of our cause.\u201d <\/p>\n Chorev said\u00a0his\u00a0release was helped by the fact that his brother was one of Shalit\u2019s kidnappers and insisted on him being included in the deal. <\/p>\n Back in Gaza, Sinwar has risen through the ranks and quickly became a key player within Hamas. Chorev said he became known for his brutality and the violence he inflicts on anyone he suspects of betrayal or collaboration. <\/p>\n \u201cIt is well known that while in prison, he tortured people, mostly members of Hamas, using\u00a0(a)\u00a0hot plate to cause them burns\u2026 his role in the Majd really tells you a lot about his character, his cruelty. But at the same time, Israelis who met him said that he can also be very practical, openly discussing\u00a0options,\u201d Chorev said. <\/p>\n As the political leader of Hamas,\u00a0Sinwar\u00a0focused on the group\u2019s foreign relationships. According to the ECFR, he was responsible for restoring Hamas\u2019 relationship with Egyptian leaders who were wary of the group\u2019s support for political Islam,\u00a0and\u00a0for\u00a0pulling in continued military funding from Iran. <\/p>\n Sinwar was considered a vital decisionmaker and likely the main point of contact within Gaza during the intense negotiations over the return of the more than 240 hostages taken into the enclave by Hamas in the October 7 attacks. The talks involved senior figures from Israel, Hamas, the United States, Qatar and Egypt. <\/p>\n \u201cAt the end of the day there are two people\u201d atop the negotiations, said Gershon Baskin, a well-known Israeli peace activist involved in the 2011 release of Shalit, the Israeli soldier. \u201cOne is Yahya Sinwar on the Hamas side, and the other is\u00a0Benjamin Netanyahu on the Israeli side.\u201d <\/p>\n More than 100 Israeli and foreign hostages\u00a0were released\u00a0by Hamas and 240 Palestinian prisoners and detainees\u00a0released by Israel\u00a0as part of a truce won in those talks, before the temporary ceasefire collapsed on December 1, with Israel and Hamas blaming each other for the failure. <\/p>\n Sinwar has been called many things over the past two months: Israeli military spokesman Lt.\u00a0Col.\u00a0Richard Hecht called Sinwar the \u201cface of evil\u201d and declared him a \u201cdead man walking.\u201d Israeli media compared him to Osama bin Laden, while a profile published by the IDF nicknamed him \u201cthe Butcher from Khan Younis.\u201d <\/p>\n But Chorev said that despite\u00a0his position in\u00a0the spotlight, Sinwar is just one of many commanders Israel needs to remove before it can say it has \u201cdestroyed Hamas.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cTo put it simply, if Israel will kill Sinwar, it doesn\u2019t mean necessarily that it will topple down Hamas. However, Hamas can still be toppled down even if Sinwar stays alive \u2026 because it\u2019s not\u00a0(a hierarchical orgnization).\u00a0In order for Israel to destroy Hamas, it needs to destroy a critical mass of power centers, not just him,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n\n The Israeli prime minister\u00a0said Wednesday\u00a0that\u00a0Israeli forces\u00a0had\u00a0surrounded the house of Yahya Sinwar, potentially closing in on\u00a0the\u00a0top Hamas official in Gaza \u2013 and the\u00a0man most wanted by\u00a0Israeli authorities. The\u00a0Israel Defense Forces\u00a0(IDF) said Sinwar was not in the house and was believed to be hiding underground in Gaza, but\u00a0a senior adviser to\u00a0Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday that <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":12645,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-12644","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12644\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} \u2018Dead man walking\u2019<\/h2>\n