After a career in the shadows, spent in Israeli prisons and the internal security apparatus of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar rose to lead the Islamist movement in the Gaza Strip.
Now, Israeli officers say, he is a "dead man walking".
Sinwar stands accused of masterminding the group's October 7 attacks, the worst in Israel's history, which officials say left around 1,200 people dead and about 240 dragged back to Gaza as hostages.
Israeli troops inspect the ravaged site of the weekend attack on the Supernova desert music Festival by Palestinian militants near Kibbutz Reim in the Negev desert in southern Israel on October 10, 2023.
Photo credit: AFP
It was probably a year or two in the planning, "took everyone by surprise" and "changed the balance of power on the ground", said Leila Seurat of the Arab Centre for Research and Political Studies (CAREP) in Paris.
The ascetic 61-year-old has not been seen since October 7. Known for his secrecy, Sinwar is a security operator "par excellence", according to Abu Abdallah, a Hamas member who spent years alongside him in Israeli jails.
An image grab from a handout video released by the Hamas Media Office shows members of its Al-Qassam Brigades leading hostages over to officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza on November 24, 2023, ahead of their transfer to Israel.
Photo credit: AFP
"He makes decisions in the utmost calm, but is intractable when it comes to defending the interests of Hamas," Abu Abdallah told AFP in 2017 after his former co-detainee was elected Hamas's leader in Gaza.
After October 7, Israeli military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht called Sinwar the "face of evil" and declared him a "dead man walking".
People standing on a rooftop watch as a ball of fire and smoke rises above a building in Gaza City on October 7, 2023 during an Israeli air strike that hit the Palestine Tower building.
Photo credit: AFP
Born in the Khan Yunis refugee camp in southern Gaza, Sinwar joined Hamas when Sheikh Ahmad Yassin founded the group around the time the first Palestinian intifada began in 1987.
Sinwar set up the group's internal security apparatus the following year, and went on to head an intelligence unit dedicated to flushing out and mercilessly punishing -- sometimes killing -- Palestinians accused of providing information to Israel.
Yahia al-Sinwar addresses supporters during a rally marking Al-Quds (Jerusalem) Day, a commemoration in support of the Palestinian people celebrated annually on the last Friday of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, in Gaza City, on April 14, 2023.
Photo credit: AFP
According to a transcript of an interrogation with security officials published in Israeli media, Sinwar professed to have strangled an alleged collaborator with a keffiyeh scarf in a Khan Yunis cemetery.
A graduate of the Islamic University in Gaza, he learned perfect Hebrew during his 23 years in Israeli jails, and is said to have a deep understanding of Israeli culture and society.
He was serving four life terms for the killing of two Israeli soldiers when he became the most senior of 1,027 Palestinians released in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011.
Israeli soldiers taking position in the Gaza Strip amid continuing battles between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Photo credit: Israeli Defence Forces / AFP
Sinwar later became a senior commander in the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, before taking overall leadership of the movement in Gaza.
While his predecessor had encouraged efforts by Hamas to present a moderate face to the world, Sinwar has preferred to force the Palestinian issue to the fore by more violent means.
Gaza's Hamas government says Israel's withering aerial and ground assault launched in response to the October 7 attacks has killed nearly 15,000 people in the Palestinian territory, most of them civilians.
Sinwar dreams of a single Palestinian state bringing together the Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank -- controlled by Mahmud Abbas's Fatah party -- and annexed east Jerusalem.
Palestinian children walk on a damaged road at the Jenin camp in the West Bank on November 4, 2023, as violence surges in the occupied territory amid the ongoing battles between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Photo credit: AFP
According to US think tank the Council on Foreign Relations, he has vowed to punish anyone obstructing reconciliation with Fatah, the rival political movement with which Hamas engaged in factional fighting after elections in 2006.
That coming together remains elusive, but the prisoner releases resulting from the current truce agreement with Israel have seen Hamas's popularity soar in the West Bank.
Sinwar has pursued a path of being "radical in military planning and pragmatic in politics", according to Seurat.
"He doesn't advocate force for force's sake, but to bring about negotiations" with Israel, she said.
The Hamas chief was added to the US list of the most wanted "international terrorists" in 2015, as was Mohammed Deif, the current commander of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades and another alleged October 7 mastermind.
Security sources outside Gaza say that both Sinwar and Deif have taken refuge in the network of tunnels built under the territory to withstand Israeli bombs.
Vowing earlier this month to "find and eliminate" Sinwar, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant urged Gazans to turn Sinwar in, adding "if you reach him before us, it will shorten the war".
