Hamas has four centers of authority—Gaza, the West Bank, the diaspora, and the prisons—and a ruling politburo that makes policy. In 2017, Haniyeh was elevated to the head of the politburo, and Sinwar was elected as the over-all chief of Hamas in Gaza. In the early years of his reign, Sinwar sometimes presented a more nuanced view of Hamas ideology. He persisted in the language of resistance and the claim that Israel was an alien Jewish entity on land bequeathed to Islam. And yet, at moments, he hinted at compromise.
In 2018, an Italian journalist named Francesca Borri visited Gaza and arranged to interview Sinwar. Borri told me that Sinwar wanted to send a message that he favored “quiet for quiet,” a pause in the armed hostilities with Israel. “The truth is that a new war is in no one’s interest,” he told Borri. “For sure, it’s not in ours. Who would like to face a nuclear power with slingshots?”
Sinwar praised the “brilliant” young people of Gaza, who managed to be inventive despite Israel’s draconian control. “With old fax machines and old computers, a group of twentysomethings assembled a 3-D printer to produce the medical equipment that is barred from entry,” he told Borri. “That’s Gaza. We are not only destitution and barefoot children. We can be like Singapore, like Dubai. And let’s make time work for us. Heal our wounds.” He also said that the Jews had once been “people like Freud, Einstein, Kafka. Experts in mathematics and philosophy. Now they are experts in drones and extrajudicial executions.”
When Borri asked Sinwar to compare his life in jail with his life as a leader in Gaza, he said, “I have only changed prisons. And, despite it all, the old one was much better than this one. I had water, electricity. I had so many books. Gaza is much tougher.”
In the years that followed, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, put in place what is now widely known as the “conception,” a set of tactics intended to contain Hamas while weakening the Palestinian Authority, in the West Bank, and stifling any talk of peace negotiations. He allowed Qatar to funnel billions of dollars into Gaza, supposedly for civic projects and governance, even though he knew that Sinwar was siphoning much of the money to buy arms and expand the “Gaza metro,” the system of tunnels and bunkers.
Over time, Sinwar and the rest of the Hamas leadership lost faith that there would be any progress with Israel. After the second intifada, the Israeli political establishment, especially under Netanyahu, became increasingly brazen in its contempt for Palestinian interests, talking about annexing the West Bank. The Trump Administration, led by Jared Kushner, helped draft the Abraham Accords, which aimed to normalize relations between Israel and the Sunni-ruled states, particularly Saudi Arabia, sidelining the Palestinians yet again.
Sinwar’s rhetoric began to darken. In 2019, he talked about the “traps” that Hamas had set in its tunnels. If the Israelis made any “stupid mistakes,” he said, “we will crush Tel Aviv.” He even declared, “The script is there, and the rehearsal has been completed. Gaza will burst with the full force of its resistance, and the West Bank will explode with all its power. Our people will attack all the settlements at once.” Eventually, he spoke of dispatching “ten thousand martyrdom-seekers” to Israel if Al-Aqsa was harmed, of igniting fires in Israeli forests, of “the eradication of Israel through armed jihad and struggle.”
I had not read much of any depth about Sinwar’s evolution until June, 2021, when I came across a long piece in Haaretz by Yaniv Kubovich, reporting that the Israeli security establishment had revised its understanding of Sinwar. Kubovich’s sources noted that Sinwar had dispensed with his “former pragmatism” and “relative humility” in favor of more aggressive military tactics and a messianic style of leadership. The shift seemed to come about not just because the Israelis were ignoring the Palestinian issue but also because Sinwar had endured a startlingly close reëlection race that year. The analysts concluded that Sinwar felt he was “paying a price” for his tacit arrangements with the Israelis.
Kubovich’s sources told him that Sinwar was now a more vivid presence on the streets, meeting frequently with ordinary residents. The sources were struck by how people reached out to touch him, how they hung photographs of him. “Sinwar is turning himself into a spiritual figure,” one told Kubovich. “He is trying to create myths around himself and to talk about himself as someone chosen by God to fight for Jerusalem on behalf of the Muslims.”
In May, 2021, fighting broke out between Hamas and Israel after Israeli police raided the Al-Aqsa Mosque, amid protests against the looming eviction of Palestinian families from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. In eleven days, Gazan forces killed roughly a dozen Israelis, whereas the I.D.F. killed two hundred and sixty Palestinians. The Israeli security establishment concluded that Sinwar, at least in his own mind, was no longer merely a Palestinian leader. He was now a leader of the Arabs, “instructed by God to protect Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa.” He began saying that the biggest gift Israel could give him would be to make him a martyr on a grand scale. “I’m leaving now by car, heading home,” he said. “They know where I live—I’m waiting for them.”
There were many Hamas speeches and public meetings prior to October 7th that should have instilled a heightened sense of alarm in the Netanyahu government. One took place on September 30, 2021, at the Commodore Hotel in Gaza City, at a conference called “Promise of the Hereafter: Post-Liberation Palestine.” The purpose of the discussions, according to accounts by Haaretz and the Middle East Media Research Institute, was to prepare for a future after “liberation”—that is, after the State of Israel “disappears.”
The conference attendees called for a declaration of independence that would be a “direct continuation” of two earlier proclamations: one drawn up after Caliph Umar took control of Jerusalem from the Byzantines, in the seventh century, and one from after Salah al-Din defeated the Crusaders and liberated the Al-Aqsa Mosque, in the twelfth century. Sinwar did not attend the proceeding, but sent a representative to assure his allies that “victory is nigh.”
The plans discussed at the Commodore Hotel were precise. Hamas had compiled a “registry” of Israeli apartments, educational institutions, power stations, sewage systems, and gas stations, all of which it intended to seize. Shekels would be changed into “gold, dollars, or dinars.” The plans sorted out Hamas’s intentions toward the existing Jewish population, deciding who would be prosecuted or killed, who would be permitted to leave or to integrate into the new state. The delegates were particularly concerned with “preventing a brain drain” of “educated Jews and experts in the areas of medicine, engineering, technology, and civilian and military industry.” Such people “should not be allowed to leave and take with them the knowledge and experience that they acquired while living in our land and enjoying its bounty, while we paid the price for all this in humiliation, poverty, sickness, deprivation, killing, and arrests.”
Shlomi Eldar, an Israeli journalist with myriad sources in Gaza and the West Bank, told me, “The conference was serious, because the Hamas leadership stopped thinking logically and began thinking religiously. When you think that you have been chosen by God to carry out his mission, you believe everything is possible.”
Sinwar not only blessed the conference but also praised the way armed struggle had been celebrated in Gazan pop culture. In May, 2022, he gave a speech lauding “Fist of the Free,” a television series that aired on Al-Aqsa, a Hamas-sponsored station. The show was advertised as a kind of answer to “Fauda,” an Israeli series that features brave but tenderhearted commandos who carry out daring operations in the West Bank and Gaza. In “Fist of the Free,” Hamas soldiers repel an Israeli invasion of Gaza and win glorious victories of counterattack, storming military outposts across the fence and taking hostages. The series, Sinwar said, “has a great impact on the struggle of our martyrs and their jihad and their preparation for the path of liberation and return.”
Of course, history played backward can take on a devotional clarity. In December, 2022, at the annual commemoration of the founding of Hamas, the organization invoked the phrase “We are coming with a roaring flood.” Mkhaimar Abusada, the scholar from Al-Azhar University, dismissed such talk as a “big joke” in those days. “They’ve talked about this for a long time, the destruction of Israel and liberation from the river to the sea,” he said. “But as a political scientist I thought this was just to keep the Palestinian people busy with fantasies.” Yet there were other signs, too. Around that time, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller but no less violent resistance group, launched rockets at Israel. Hamas chose not to join the fight, putting out the word that it was holding fire for a more consequential battle.