Nadene Goldfoot
Wanted: By Israel
Yahya Sinwar
Yahya Sinwar born 29 October 1962), also spelled Yehya Sinwar, is a Palestinian politician who has been leader of Hamas, the Sunni Islamist political and military organization that rules the Gaza Strip, since 2017.He'll be 62 years old by Halloween.
He was born in the Khan Yunis refugee camp in Egyptian-ruled Gaza in 1962 to a family who had been expelled or fled from Ashkelon during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. He finished his studies at the Islamic University of Gaza where he received a bachelor's degree in Arabic Studies.
What did he do?
Wanted: 1. For orchestrating the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians he considered to be collaborators in 1989, (murder of 6 people)
He was sentenced to four life sentences by Israel, of which he served 22 years until his release among 1,026 others in a 2011 prisoner exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
Sinwar was one of the co-founders of the security apparatus of Hamas. In 2017, he was elected the leader of Hamas, and claimed to pursue "peaceful, popular resistance" to the Israeli occupation the following year, a position which was later abandoned.
In February 2017, Sinwar was secretly elected the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, taking over from Ismail Haniyeh. In March, he established a Hamas-controlled administrative committee for the Gaza Strip, opposing power sharing with the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah.
Sinwar rejects any reconciliation with Israel.
He has called on militants to capture more Israeli soldiers.
In September 2017, a new round of negotiations with the Palestinian Authority began in Egypt, and Sinwar agreed to dissolve the Hamas administrative committee for Gaza.
More recently he has silenced hard-line voices in Gaza, ordering against the use of tunnels that Muhammad Deif wanted to use to sneak fighters into Israel before they were shut down by new classified Israeli technology in 2017.
NBC News joined an Israeli unit this month in a tunnel below Khan Younis, the city in southern Gaza that abuts the refugee camp where Sinwar was born in 1962 and raised.
After entering the shaft through the remains of what was once a house, the air became hot and damp below ground.
But after several minutes, the tunnel opened into a wider space with tiled walls, a kitchen and fixtures for televisions.
Brig. Gen. Dan Goldfus, commander of Israeli forces in Khan Younis, said (on Feb 24 2024) the space in a tunnel below Khan Younis had been recently used by Sinwar and other Hamas leaders. The presence of beds indicated that senior figures had been there, he said.
Yahya was re-elected as the leader of Hamas in 2021, and was subject to an assassination attempt by Israel that year.
Sinwar is regarded as the mastermind behind the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Sinwar
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/05/29/yahya-sinwar-the-elusive-hamas-leader_6672967_4.html
Attn: Goldfus is original spelling for Goldfoot; a distant relative of mine.
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