Yahya Sinwar of Hamas chairs a meeting with leaders of Palestinian factions at his office in Gaza City, April 13, 2022.

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Adel Hana/AP

Yayha Sinwar has been a central figure within Hamas for decades and the most crucial figure behind the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel and the bloody conflict in Gaza that followed the following year.

Sinwar, a short, wiry man with close-cropped hair that is now white, was known for his obsessive level of secrecy and security measures, and was labeled a psychopath by Israeli politicians and security officials.

Sinwar’s death in an Israeli attack on Gaza fulfilled a promise made last year by Israeli leaders, including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who vowed to kill him in retaliation for the wave of killings and hostage takings that have devastated Israel. years ago, horrified.

It was widely believed that Sinwar was responsible for the decision to return prisoners to Palestinian territory, an action that irrevocably changed the course of Israeli-Palestinian history.

He had spent more than two decades in Israeli prisons before winning his freedom 12 years ago in a hostage deal of the kind he hoped to broker during the current conflict.

The attack on October 7 last year won Hamas support among many Palestinians, many of whom see it as a form of resistance against decades of Israeli subjugation.

Over the past 12 months, most Palestinians and Israelis believed Sinwar remained largely underground in part of the vast tunnel network that has confounded the Israeli military as it operated in Gaza.

But his role in repeated rounds of ceasefire talks between Hamas and Israel — brokered by the United States, Egypt and Qatar — gave him significant influence as he continued to try to outmaneuver Israel and survive.

Born on October 29, 1962, Hamas said Sinwar helped establish the group’s internal security apparatus in the late 1980s. Among Palestinians he was nicknamed the Butcher of Khan Younis, where he grew up in southern Gaza. For years, his role within Hamas was to help root out suspected Palestinian informants for Israel.

He was imprisoned in Israel in 1988 with four life sentences, accused of playing a role in the killing of Israeli soldiers and four suspected Palestinian collaborators with Israel.

“He (has) so many secrets,” says his former prison buddy Esmat Mansour, who now acts as a commentator on current affairs in the Arabic-language media.

Mansour recalls that Sinwar had assembled a small team of confidantes who would smuggle cellphones into the prison, interrogate new prisoners about how they had been caught preparing an attack on Israel, and catch Palestinian prisoners serving as informants for Israel .

“So many spies,” Mansour said while speaking to NPR in the Palestinian city of Ramallah.

In 2006, Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was captured by Hamas and held hostage in Gaza for five years. The man guarding the captured soldier was none other than Sinwar’s own brother, Mohammed.

In 2011, Hamas freed the captured soldier in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Sinwar’s brother made sure Sinwar was there.

“All the prisoners (looked) at him as a man who can decide their lives,” Mansour said.

His VIP status in prison and his return to Gaza with the released prisoners helped Sinwar rise through the ranks and lead the group’s Gaza branch, which has been designated a terrorist organization by several countries, including the United States labeled.

But over the years he appeared very rarely in public and met groups of foreign journalists only twice, during periods of conflict with Israel.

People are reflected in a window with a poster of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in the Palestinian camp Bourj al-Barajneh, on August 8, in Beirut.

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“Your presence before us is a great achievement and asset to our people and our cause,” he told visiting reporters at a news conference in Gaza City in 2018 that lasted two hours.

Hamas held two Israeli civilians and the bodies of two slain Israeli soldiers at the time. When NPR asked Sinwar about the prisoners, he said it was a confidential file he didn’t want to talk about.

Hamas had encouraged violent protests along Israel’s border fence of the blockaded Gaza Strip during this period. He said it was a strategy he learned from his hunger strikes in Israeli prison, where he said Palestinian prisoners had protested for better conditions from their Israeli jailers.

The strategy seemed to work.

Hamas and Israel, who do not speak directly to each other, have reached an indirect agreement known as “silence for silence.” Hamas agreed to cool hostilities and Israel agreed to reduce high unemployment in Gaza, granting coveted Israeli work permits to thousands of workers from the area.

A war between Hamas and Israel in 2021 had torpedoed that unofficial agreement. Sinwar gave another press conference to foreign media after the 2021 round of fighting, denying that Hamas had diverted international humanitarian aid to its clandestine effort to build underground tunnels for Hamas fighters.

Israeli permits for Gaza workers resumed and increased to higher numbers, while fighting between Gaza and Israel ceased. The number of work permits Israel granted to Gaza workers before the current war exceeded 8,000.

Eyal Hulata, who served as Israel’s national security adviser last year, thought this strategy gave Israel some peace on the Gaza border.

“I don’t know. I thought we understood what Sinwar was thinking, and this was so wrong,” Hulata told NPR in a recent briefing with reporters.

When Hamas fighters stormed the border, killing about 1,200 people and taking at least 240 prisoners into Gaza, Israeli society and the country’s political and military elite were largely confused and deeply shaken, according to Israeli officials.

In response, the Israeli military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 42,400 Palestinians and injured more than 99,000, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.

Sinwar was the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip at the time of the October 7 attack last year. In August this year, he took over as top political leader of the Hamas organization following the assassination of its political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran, allegedly by Israel.

At the time, Sinwar was one of the few remaining senior Hamas officials after the killings of Haniyeh, deputy political chief Salah Arouri in January and top military commander Mohammed Deif in July. Israel confirmed Deif’s murder and is believed to have committed the other murders.

David Meidan, the Israeli negotiator who, along with other officials, approved Sinwar’s release from prison in a 2011 exchange that freed Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a single Israeli captured soldier, says Sinwar’s strategy for attacking October 7, 2023 was similar.

“First of all, to capture as many hostages as possible and use them as a tool to release his friends,” Meidan said.

Sinwar had failed to secure the release of his fellow prisoners, with whom he had spent years behind bars in Israel. But last year, Israel released a number of Palestinian women and minors imprisoned in recent years in exchange for Hamas’ release of some of the Israeli hostages taken to Gaza last October.

During that time, in late November 2023, both sides agreed to a temporary ceasefire in the war. For every ten hostages Hamas releases per day, Israel extended the ceasefire for another day and released 30 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.

Many Israelis were concerned that a pause in the fighting would help Hamas fighters regroup and allow more time for international pressure to force Israel to resume its military assault. But Israel resumed fighting in Gaza after a dispute over the type of hostages Hamas offered to release and renewed Gaza’s rocket fire on Israel.

Meidan said the lull in fighting had helped Sinwar buy time – which would be key to his survival. After the last war between Israel and Hamas in 2021, Sinwar had challenged Israel to kill him and walked openly on the streets of Gaza.

That was not an approach he repeated later, but he was killed anyway.

Editor’s note: This is an updated version of one profile of Yahya Sinwar published on December 3, 2023.