Wikipedia (en)
Yahya Sinwar (Arabic: يحيى السنوار, romanized: Yaḥyá al-Sanwār; 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 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 Palestine War. He finished his studies at the Islamic University of Gaza where he received a bachelor's degree in Arabic Studies.
For orchestrating the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians he considered to be collaborators in 1989, 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. He 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.
In September 2015, Sinwar was designated a terrorist by the United States government, and Hamas and the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades have also been designated terrorist organisations by the United States, the European Union and other countries. In May 2024, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) applied for arrest warrants for Sinwar and several other Hamas and Israeli leaders as part of the ICC investigation in Palestine, citing charges of "extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape, and sexual assault in detention."
