Who is Yahya Sinwar?
Yahya Sinwar is the Hamas leader who Israeli officials said was the main architect of the group’s Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel and who the country’s military has been chasing for more than a year.
It’s been believed that Sinwar, who was in charge of day-to-day operations in Gaza prior to the Oct. 7 attack, had been escaping Israel Defense Forces using Hamas’ complex tunnel system in the Palestinian enclave. After the Oct. 7 attack, a former IDF spokesperson described him as a “dead man walking” as the military vowed to eliminate Sinwar.
Sinwar joined Hamas after it was founded in 1987, gaining a reputation for brutality after he reportedly helped to form the militant group’s internal security force, according a profile of him by European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank.
He was captured by Israel just two years later and sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in killing Israeli troops and Palestinian collaborators. Sinwar returned to Gaza in 2011 during a prisoner exchange for one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was taken hostage by Hamas and held for five years.
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