Israeli forces may be laying siege to the home of Yahya Sinwar, a top Hamas official in the Gaza Strip and one of Israeli authorities’ most wanted men, Israel’s prime minister said Wednesday.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said Mr. Sinwar was not at home but is believed to be. hide underground But a senior adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday: “It’s only a matter of time before we get him.”
Israel has publicly accused Sinwar of being the “mastermind” behind the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, but experts say he could be one of several , making him one of the main targets of the war in Gaza.
Mr. Sinwar, a longtime figure in the Islamist Palestinian group, was responsible for building Hamas’s military wing before forging important new relationships with regional Arab powers as Hamas’s civilian and political leader. .
He was elected as HamasIn 2017, he was appointed to the Politburo, the main decision-making body, as the political leader of Hamas’s Gaza branch. But he later became the de facto leader of the Politburo, according to an investigation by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).
He has been designated a global terrorist by the US State Department since 2015 and has recently been sanctioned by the UK and France.
initial: Sinwar was born in 1962 in the Khan Younis refugee camp in southern Gaza. His family became refugees. Palestinian village during the Arab-Israeli war.
He joined Hamas in the late 1980s and became one of the founders of the feared internal intelligence service known as Majid.
He was convicted in 1988 of involvement in the murders of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel, and spent more than 20 years in an Israeli prison.
Sinwar later said he spent years studying his enemy, including learning to speak Hebrew.
Upon his return to Gaza, Shinwar rose through the ranks and quickly became a central figure within Hamas. He became known for his brutality and the violence he inflicted on those he suspected of betrayal or cooperation, said Harel Chorev, a senior researcher at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center for Middle East and African Studies.
Learn more about Shinwar and why Israel calls him “The Walking Dead.”