Mick Hartley

At Tablet Judith Miller learns from an Israeli who spent ‘hundreds of hours’ with Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar:

The Palestinian in the clinic at one of Israel’s highest security prisons near Beersheba had a persistent pain in the back of his neck. He trembled and had trouble walking. Yuval Bitton, then a 28-year-old dentist just a year out of medical school, suspected that his patient might be suffering from a C.V.A., an ischemic cerebrovascular accident, resulting from a life-threatening brain tumor. “He needs to be hospitalized, immediately,” Bitton advised the prison doctors.

Dr. Bitton’s diagnosis was quickly confirmed at the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba. The surgery took hours. The prisoner survived. When he returned to the prison, he thanked Bitton and the rest of the prison medical staff for having saved his life—in excellent Hebrew.

The year was 2004. The patient was Yahya Sinwar, the Palestinian who in 2017 would become the leader of Hamas in Gaza and subsequently the mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel in which 1,200 mostly Israeli civilians died and 240 were taken hostage….

Sinwar studied his enemy assiduously. He read Israeli newspapers, took classes in Jewish history through the prison’s “open university,” and spoke to Bitton about Hamas’ goals—the expulsion of all Jews from Palestine, the duty to implement God’s laws as given to Muhammad on all sacred Muslim soil…. “The struggle continued inside the prison,” Bitton said. Sinwar was not married then, and he had few visitors. “Hamas and the struggle were his life.”  […].

The Wall Street Journal reported on Feb. 29 that Sinwar had sent a message to exiled leaders claiming that Hamas was winning the war in Gaza and that international pressure would soon force Israel to stop the fighting because of the high civilian death toll, which according to unverifiable Hamas and United Nations estimates, now stands at over 31,000 Palestinians. Israel estimates that it has killed approximately 13,000 Hamas fighters.

Safe in Qatar and Turkey, Hamas’ leadership outside Gaza took a different view: They concluded that Israel was crushing the group and seizing ever more ground, despite increasing pressure from the West for Israel to agree to a cease-fire. Yet according to the Journal, Sinwar assured his confederates that despite Israel’s tactical successes, Hamas’ four remaining battalions in Rafah were fully prepared to withstand a likely ground assault, and that Israel would ultimately yield to Hamas’ demands.

According to the Journal, Egyptian intelligence officials who have received Sinwar’s messages think he has “lost touch with reality.” Yet the success of Sinwar’s bloody Oct. 7 offensive and his presence on (or under) the ground in Gaza gives him credibility and authority that Hamas’ external leadership lacks. Practically speaking, the fighting will end when Sinwar says it does, so his assessment of Hamas’ strategic position and of Israeli psychology is the one that matters.

Whether Sinwar has become demented or merely diabolical, Bitton said, the Hamas leader’s hard-line stance does not surprise him. In his desire to rid Palestine of Jews for good, Sinwar has been nothing if not consistent.