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Mr. Sinwar, one of the main architects of the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel, has spent decades with the militant group, working his way to the top of its leadership.
Yahya Sinwar, the newly named political chief of Hamas and one of the masterminds of the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel, has long been viewed as one of the militant group’s most influential leaders, wielding outsize power while remaining mostly hidden in underground tunnels beneath Gaza. His selection on Tuesday as Hamas’s top diplomatic leader — replacing Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in Iran last week — consolidates his power.
Here’s what we know about Mr. Sinwar and his past.
Formative years
Mr. Sinwar was born in Gaza in 1962 to a family that had fled its home, along with several hundred thousand other Palestinian Arabs who fled or were forced to flee during the wars surrounding the creation of the state of Israel. This displacement deeply influenced his decision to join Hamas in the 1980s.
Mr. Sinwar had been recruited by Hamas’s founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who made him chief of an internal security unit known as Al Majd. His job was to find and punish those suspected of violating Islamic morality laws or cooperating with the Israeli occupiers, a position that eventually landed him in trouble with Israeli authorities.
A crucible
Mr. Sinwar was imprisoned in 1988 for murdering four Palestinians whom he accused of apostasy or collaborating with Israel, according to Israeli court records. He spent more than two decades in prison in Israel, where he learned Hebrew and developed an understanding of Israeli culture and society.
While incarcerated, Mr. Sinwar took advantage of an online university program and devoured Israeli news. He translated into Arabic tens of thousands of pages of contraband Hebrew-language autobiographies written by the former heads of Israel’s domestic security agency, Shin Bet.
Yuval Bitton, an Israeli dentist who treated Mr. Sinwar when he was in custody and who developed a relationship with him, said Mr. Sinwar had surreptitiously shared the translated pages so that inmates could study the agency’s counterterrorism tactics. Mr. Sinwar liked to call himself a “specialist in the Jewish people’s history,” Dr. Bitton said.
