By Scott Ritter, reproduced with thanks
Yahya Sinwar was killed fighting Israeli soldiers in the ruins of Gaza. His death will serve as an inspiration for Palestinians for years to come. If there is to be a free and independent Palestine, it will be because of the sacrifice made by Yahya Sinwar in the cause of its creation. He is the true father of Palestine.
He was a child of the camps, born into captivity in the Gazan Khan Younis refugee camp, the son of Palestinian citizens of Majdal ‘Asqalan (present-day Ashkelon) who were forcibly driven from their homes by Israeli forces in 1948 in what is referred to as the Nakba, or catastrophe.
He was one of the first to join Hamas when it broke away from the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, in 1987, and founded the Majd, or security services of Hamas, which he commanded. From the start he recognised that purging Hamas and the Palestinian population of Israeli agents was a top priority, a prerequisite for success. When he was arrested by the Israelis and sentenced to four life terms for his involvement in the abduction and subsequent deaths of two Israeli soldiers, he openly confessed to killing 12 Israeli informants.
In prison he emerged as the leader of Hamas, organising the prisoners behind bars, and coordinating with Hamas leaders in Gaza. He studied Hebrew and the Israeli people and nation, and captured his experiences in a ‘novel’, The thorn and the carnation, which he noted was fictional despite every incident described being true.
He was released from prison in 2011, part of a prisoner exchange agreed to by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
He quickly rose up the ranks of Hamas, bringing its political and military wings into harmony, and working to incorporate Hamas into the so-called ‘axis of resistance’, led by Iran, and which included Hezbollah (Lebanon) and Ansarullah (Yemen).
He married shortly after being released from prison, and his wife, who holds a master’s degree in theology from the Islamic University of Gaza, blessed him with three children, including an eldest son, Ibrahim, from who he took his honorific, Abu Ibrahim (‘the father of Ibrahim’). He swore that his progeny would not be condemned to spend their lives as children of the camps.
To this end, he helped plan and execute the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel..
The attack resulted in more than 1,200 Israeli deaths, more than a third of whom were soldiers, and of the rest, more than half were killed by Israeli forces as part of the ‘Hannibal Directive’ in which the Israeli Defense Force is tasked with killing any Israeli captive so as to prevent subsequent political pressure being brought on Israeli leadership for the kind of prisoner swap that had led to his release.
He had spent a lifetime studying the Israelis, and he knew them like the back of his hand. He knew that by humiliating the Israeli military and security forces, by taking hundreds of Israelis prisoner, that he would compel the Israeli nation to shed the thin veneer of civility and humanity it wore like a cloak to deceive the world, and instead compel the Israelis to show to the world the truth about who they really were—a nation who believed they were above all others in the world, whose self-proclaimed status as ‘God’s chosen people’ allowed them to lord over the ‘human animals’who did not profess their faith, raping, murdering, and robbing at will without fear of consequence.
He knew Israel would fully implement its cruel Dahiya Doctrine of collective punishment, murdering tens of thousands of Palestinians because of their collective rage at being humiliated by Hamas.
The destruction of Gaza by Israel
He understood the Israeli psychology, predicting that not only would they adapt an artificial intelligence-based targeting tool, known as ‘Lavender’, that they would use to justify the bombing of civilian neighborhoods to kill low-level Hamas officials and their families, but that the Israelis would be compelled to brag about it, exposing their crimes to the world.
He knew that Operation Al Aqsa Flood—the name of the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel—would set in motion events that would not only lead to the diminishment of Israel, but the emergence of a Palestinian homeland.
He knew he was marked for death, often delivering public addresses in Gaza after which he would announce to the press that he was walking home—openly daring Israel to kill him.
His death was a top priority of Israel in the days, weeks, and months following October 7, 2023. The Israelis tried to diminish him as a leader, spreading reports that painted him as a billionaire who enriched himself off of the misery of the Palestinian people, and a coward who hid beneath the ground, surrounded by his family and Israeli hostages whom he used as human shields.
In the end, he did die at the hands of the Israelis. But he did not die in a tunnel.He did not die surrounded by human shields. He died fighting, at the command of Hamas fighters in the streets of Gaza.
Israeli drone imagery of Yahya Sinwar moments before his death
It was an accidental encounter, where Israeli forces, probing the ruins of Gaza, made contact with several Hamas fighters.
In the firefight that followed, Israeli tanks fired into the building where the fighters had positioned themselves. Four of the Hamas fighters were killed. When Israeli soldiers tried to make entry into the building, they were driven off by hand grenades thrown by the sole survivor, who was badly wounded. Israeli infantry, using anti-tank missiles, fired into the building, severely wounding the surviving Hamas fighter. A drone was flown into the structure, revealing a defiant figure, seated in a chair, glaring at the camera. One arm had been blown off the fighter, and his legs were badly mangled. With his one remaining arm, the fighter picked up a piece of wood and threw it at the drone.
Armed with the knowledge of where the wounded Hamas fighter was, the Israelis again fired on the building, killing him.
His name was Yahya Sinwar. He died a hero’s death. Leading his men in combat against the invader.
So that his children, and the children of other “Children of the Camps” like himself, would one day know freedom.
Yahya Sinwar has now been immortalised as a martyr in the most righteous cause imaginable—the birth of a nation trying to liberate its people from a cruel and unjust occupation.
Over the course of the next days, Israel and the United States will seek to use Yahya Sinwar’s death for propaganda purposes by appealing to the Palestinian people to reject his fate by surrendering to the tyranny of Israeli dominance and occupation.
What the politicians in Tel Aviv and Washington, DC fail to understand is that the Palestinian people have already embraced the fate of Yahya Sinwar as their own, that they welcome martyrdom if it means that their children will live free as citizens of an independent Palestinian state. He was a child of the camps. He was born in the camps. Raised and nourished by the camps.
And he died defending the camps from the Israeli occupier. So that there would never again be generations of Palestinians whose lives were defined by the prison of the camps.
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