What is Hamas Leader Yahya Sinwar's Legacy?
Israel killed Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, one of the few leaders who was left in Gaza to lead the war on the Palestine side. For many in the Western world, Yahya Sinwar will be just a terrorist, and for many in the Middle East, he will remain a hero. It is difficult to answer who he really was amidst the chaos of misinformation and troubled history that has turned this region into a hellhole of violence and mistrust.
Hassan remembers Sinwar as a man who unceremoniously walked out of a mosque in Gaza, surrounded by his colleagues, amidst an escalation of the conflict in 2021. She and her TV crew could walk up to him and ask for an interview, which he agreed to. The day they asked for his interview was the day after the 11 days of incessant bombing of Gaza by Israel. Hassan said she and her colleagues were surprised to see him out in the open under such circumstances as everyone had believed he was hiding.
This account shows that he was a daring man. After the October 7 attack, he decided to stay back in Gaza to lead the fight. He headed the military wing of Gaza, and as he rose to power within Hamas, so too did the military options.
Sinwar is accused of surrounding himself with civilians, using them as human shields, as protection against Israeli attacks. No evidence has so far surfaced to confirm or refute this allegation popularised mainly by Israel. When he died, he was sitting alone on a single sofa in the ruins of a just bombed building.
Sinwar posed for a photograph that day, amidst the rubble of the bombing, in an armchair, with his famously defiant smile. The image was powerful and meaningful in reflecting the resilience of the Gazan people and the unrelenting conviction of its leaders. It is a curious irony that he took his last breath sitting on another such chair in another similar-looking bombing scene.
Who Was Yahya Sinwar?
Franklin Foer, a staff reporter at The Atlantic, in an extremely one-sided and unkind article published in Atlantic on Sinwar’s death, compared his military-political career to that of a suicide bomber, accused of strapping entire Gaza to his body and killed thousands while carrying out his ‘suicide attack’ on Israel. Foer was referring to the incidents beginning with the October 7 attack. Yet, as Khaled Mashal, a popular leader of Hamas living in exile in Qatar and seen as a moderate voice in Hamas by many, said, history did not begin on October 7.
As human rights leaders and social workers who had worked in Gaza for many years pointed out soon after the incident of October 7, Hamas emerged in Gaza as a people’s movement of extremely radicalised individuals shaped by their horrid experience of living inside the open prison that was Gaza, all the result of a convoluted strategy of Israel to keep Gaza like that.
(Franklin Foer is an American Jew. The Atlantic should have mentioned that when they published the article. That would have been objective journalism).
One could argue that what Sinwar and his team did on October 7 was sign a death warrant for the Gazan people. Israel’s might and wrath are well-known in history. Provoking Israel to go to war with it without a proper defence plan was suicidal. Maybe Hamas thought the tunnel network and the huge cache of amassed weapons would give it a winning chance. Maybe Hamas leadership within Gaza, led by Yahya Sinwar, was fed up with desperation by the iron hand of Israel terrorising Gaza’s citizens day in and day out with the ID card, transit pass, settler violence and encroachment status quo, and a severe economic siege. Maybe Hamas thought the Iran-led ring of fire forces and even the Arab countries would join their fight. Hamas’ rightful rage and their miscalculation about their military prowess became weapons in the hands of a warmonger, Benjamin Netanyahu, a God-given opportunity for him to regain his losing grip on Israel’s political system.
Hamas tried a political solution when they participated in the elections, won the mandate, and ruled Gaza for a few years. Reports that came out of Gaza a few months before October 7 suggested that Hamas was losing popular support in Gaza. How much of October 7 was Sinwar’s decision, Hamas leadership’s decision, and the people’s collective decision? One would have to wait a long time to get the answer to this question.
Revenge is primitive, while diplomacy and negotiation are the forte of a modern state. If hellbent on revenge, Israel could have at least decided to use Mossad and its stealth operations to eliminate Hamas leaders and the organisation and spare innocent civilians. But for Netanyahu, that would have been a political nonstarter.
Coming back to Yahya Sinwar’s legacy and to Hind Hassan, the VICE News reporter who interviewed him in 2021, when provoked by her about the violent methods of Hamas in fighting Israel, Sinwar told Hassan that his people were expected to be the perfect victims and that they simply cannot be. After the killing of Sinwar, in her interview with Al Jazeera TV, Hassan said Sinwar came across as a man who was defiant in what he was doing.
Yahya Sinwar: Glimpses of the Individual
Iran has declared Sinwar a martyr, “a model for the youth and children who will carry forward his path toward the liberation of Palestine” and “a source of inspiration”.
During prison time, he learnt Hebrew, the language of the Jews and Israel. He gave fluent interviews in Hebrew. In this small fact about him, one could see his passion for learning and possibly his attempt to understand the Israelis or engage with them in close quarters by learning their language and ways. In his interview in Hebrew with Israeli TV channels, he refused to recognise Israel but said that a temporary truce was possible. He organised prisoners to protest against the dire working conditions inside. In 2008, he fought a personal medical battle and survived brain cancer.
In 2011, in return for an Israeli soldier abducted by Palestinian extremists, more than 1000 Palestinian prisoners were released, and Yahya Sinwar was one among them. Crowds of people waited in Palestine to greet and cheer Sinwar as he came home.
In 2017, Sinwar became the Gaza Chief of Hamas. The Western media at that time alleged that he had killed another Hamas leader, Mahmoud Ishtewi, in a power grab. The highly successful ‘March of Return’ weekly campaign that Hamas held at the Israel-Palestine borders was led by Sinwar after he assumed the leadership of the organisation in Gaza. These demonstrations demanding the right of Palestinians to return to their ancestral villages brought back the Palestinian issue to the international political stage. Those were the days when Sinwar and Hamas at least partially tried democratic protest as a solution to Palestine's problems.
In 2015, the US and the European Union had him declared as a global terrorist. The same year, Hamas had accepted in its new charter the coexistence of Palestine and Israel. Word was that there was an informal agreement between Sinwar and Netanyahu. That keeps one wondering to what extent that informal acquaintance went. If one is to presume wildly, one could even ask- did that have something to do with the October 7 attack that benefitted Netanyahu hugely? There were unsolicited rumours that Netanyahu orchestrated the October 7 attacks. Wild, they seem, these rumours, but politics and power games tend to be as surreal as they could get.
All the available facts and assumptions can only partly answer the question of whether Yahya Sinwar is a terrorist or a hero. As always, the truth is located between these two highly cliched notions. One perfect reality remains that Sinwar was a leader moulded in fire by his people’s history and suffering.
References
Sinwar Did “Not Shy Away” From Tough Questions: Journalist, October 18, 2024, Al Jazeera TV, Youtube.
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