Something Amiss With Sinwar's Brain

 

"From this engagement, they fled; they didn’t fight or anything. The battalion commander and the soldiers managed to hit some of them. And from here, they dispersed. Sinwar ran to the house behind me, another terrorist fled to that house, and two others in that direction. Moments later, the soldiers exchanged fire with some of the gunmen, who fled in different directions. One soldier was wounded in the exchanges.

"Not long after that, an officer spotted fresh drops of blood leading into the house where Sinwar was hiding. It was later revealed that Sinwar had been wounded in the arm when hit by the battalion commander during the first engagement.

"Sinwar spent time in other tunnels in the Rafah area, including in a network where six Israeli hostages —  Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, and Almog Sarusi — were held and later murdered by their captors. The house where Sinwar was killed was located less than 500 meters from the tunnel where the six hostages were executed at the end of August."

Emanuel Fabrian, Times of Israel 

Yahya Sinwar spent decades in an Israeli prison as a member of Hamas, convicted not of killing Israelis, which was his main focus, but of the brutal murder of four Palestinians whom he felt had collaborated with Israel. He was sentenced to four consecutive life terms. While in the Israeli penal system, Sinwar taught himself Hebrew and studied Israeli society by reading Israeli media. He fell ill while in prison, after the prison's dentist realized something amiss with Sinwar's brain. Rushed to hospital, Israeli surgeons removed a tumour on his brain, saving his life. Who might have imagined that saving his life would result in the future in the deaths of countless others, both Israelis and Palestinians?

In 2011, a deal was struck with Hamas to free an Israeli soldier who had been kidnapped when Hamas  terrorists invaded Israel though a tunnel under the Kerem Shalom border crossing, killing two soldiers and abducting Gilad Shalit. Five years after his abduction Shalit was finally freed in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, Sinwar among them. Sinwar felt he had discovered, through this episode, an Israeli Achilles heel; Israel would do anything to recover Israelis who  had been kidnapped. He resolved to use that lesson as a future weapon.

"The issue of prisoners can only be resolved in this way."

"For the prisoner, capturing an Israeli soldier is the best news in the universe, because he knows that a glimmer of hope has been opened for him."

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, 2011

He rejoined Hamas, gradually moving up to greater authority positions, until in 2017 he became the Hamas leader in Gaza. And as the leader, he began planning a bold and elaborate attack against Israeli complacency he had established through the pretext that Hamas had agreed to a semi-permanent truce, and matters would remain at, and not surmount a simmering hostility with the occasional violent, but temporary outbreak of  'resistance' against the 'occupation'. A number of schemes were considered and all set aside, for the final attack that became October 7's terrorist savagery against civilian farming communities in southern Israel.

Sinwar and his inner circle, according to minutes of  high-level Hamas meetings, spent years in planning the savage assault; the "big Project", including a "large and convincing disguise and deception process" to lull the Israeli government into a false sense of security. And it worked all too well. Israel became comfortable with the impression that despite living next to a violently hostile neighbour, their superior strength in a professional military would ensure that while a terrorist militia would expend energy in threats, a serious threat could be averted through a sustained truce.

IDF troops stand over the body of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in Gaza on October 17, 2024. (Courtesy)

 

By 2022, incipient rumours of a potential assault reached Israeli intelligence, but seemed too far-fetched to arouse a sense of caution, stretching credulity. Yet on October 7, 2023, six thousand Palestinian terrorists flooded across the destroyed border from Gaza into southern Israel with orders to rape and slaughter at will, in the process taking live videos of their hideous acts of inhumanity. The goal of bringing hostages back to Gaza to barter for Palestinian prisoners was fulfilled when infants, girls and women, the elderly and infirm, entire families and Israeli soldiers numbering over 250 were taken hostage.

1,200 Israelis were murdered, among them the nephew of the dentist who had identified the presence of a lethal tumour in Sinwar's brain. Saving his life, and sacrificing that of his nephew, among countless other Israelis. Since then, while Yahya Sinwar and his courageous slaughter-happy stalwarts were evading capture or death by the Israel Defense Forces by hiding themselves among the Palestinian civilian population, thousands of Palestinians have also met death; a sacrifice that Hamas is content to live with, as long as they could themselves live.

Yahya Sinwar took immediately to making himself scarce, by using the multitude of subterranean tunnels, the vast network that was built under Gaza, in lieu of maintaining a proper infrastructure for a nation-in-waiting for Palestinians. Despite all of which, the antisemitic nature of Palestinian society, nurtured on hate from cradle to grave for generations, dote on terrorism, considering Hamas to be their champions, and supporting its agenda of murder and mayhem committed against Israel and Jews. We do reap what we sow, and Palestinians are suffering now in Gaza, what they have committed to delivering to Israel; obliteration.

A Wednesday firefight in Rafah between Israeli soldiers and a terrorist group finally led to the elimination of Israel's tormentor, a hellish brain that concocted a nightmare of slaughter and rape on October 7, 2023. That brain was stilled forever when a tank shelled the building in which Sinwar sought shelter from Israeli troops, when an explosion from that shell shot a spike through that maleficent brain. His suspense is over; he ran and he hid as long as he could, but could not escape the consequences of his lethal hatred for Jews and for the presence of Israel.

 

View from the spot where Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was killed by IDF troops on October 16, 2024, on the second floor of a house in the Tel Sultan neighborhood of Rafah, southern Gaza, October 20, 2024. (Emanuel Fabian/Times of Israel)